Permission to Be a Glorious Mess

There are periods in life when things are not exactly falling apart, but they aren't arranging themselves attractively either.

The house is untidy. You are behind on something. A decision remains stubbornly unmade and dinner is whatever can be assembled from the ingredients requiring the least imagination. An emotion you thought had been dealt with has returned without an appointment. You may, despite all this, be functioning reasonably well. There may even be people who think you have everything under control.

I have always liked the phrase glorious mess. Not because there is anything particularly glorious about losing your keys while looking for your phone, or discovering that the important piece of paper you put somewhere safe is now extremely safe. I like the affection in it, the suggestion that disorder doesn't automatically diminish the person standing in the middle of it.

We are often less generous in the way we describe ourselves.

The performance of having it together

Most adults become quite accomplished at appearing fine.

Someone asks how things are going and we say busy, one of the great multipurpose words of adult life. It can cover an impressive range of circumstances without inviting further investigation. Meanwhile, we answer emails politely while privately furious, remember passwords and birthdays, turn up where we said we would, pay bills, make appointments and locate clean clothes. A surprising amount can be going on underneath an apparently competent life.

Women have had a particularly complicated education in composure. We are permitted considerably more emotional expression than women of previous generations, at least in theory, while still encountering fairly exacting ideas about how that expression should occur. Anger tends to be received better when communicated calmly. Vulnerability is admired when accompanied by sufficient self-awareness. Grief has acquired a suspicious tendency to be discussed in terms of what it will eventually teach us. Overwhelm is understandable, although it helps if you have a plan.

Even messiness has developed an aesthetic. There is the charming variety involving tousled hair, overflowing bookshelves and kitchen tables covered in creative projects. Then there is the kind involving resentment, avoidance, unopened correspondence, snapping at someone you love and crying about something that is quite obviously not the actual thing you are crying about.

That version rarely makes the mood board, despite being considerably more familiar.

I wonder if part of our discomfort comes from how readily we confuse functioning with being all right. We can be extraordinarily competent while frightened, lonely, angry or exhausted. In fact, competence is sometimes the very thing that allows those states to remain invisible for longer than they otherwise would. If the machinery keeps running, nobody necessarily thinks to ask what it is costing to keep it running.

Including us.

The problem of being internally inconsistent

One reason I was originally drawn to Internal Family Systems was its matter-of-fact acceptance that a person can contain contradictory impulses without one of them being fraudulent.

We already know this from ordinary life. Affection doesn't prevent irritation. Gratitude doesn't abolish disappointment. We can want something very much and resent what is required to have it. A decision can be right and still involve loss. Yet when these contradictions become uncomfortable, we often assume that maturity requires us to resolve them.

This is when the internal committee becomes particularly active. One part presents an entirely sensible case for getting on with things while another has apparently gone on strike. The productive part regards the exhausted one with suspicion. Somewhere in the background, somebody would like everyone to stop talking.

IFS can help us become curious about these different responses, especially when they are entrenched or protective, but I don't think every contradiction requires a therapeutic interpretation. Ambivalence is sometimes an accurate response to a complicated situation. Perhaps the expectation of internal consistency is stranger than the inconsistency itself.

Human beings change their minds. We repeat mistakes after understanding them, behave generously in one situation and badly in another, and occasionally know exactly what would be good for us while having no interest whatsoever in doing it. We can be brave about something enormous and strangely undone by something trivial.

The surprise this continues to cause is almost as interesting as the inconsistency itself.

Perhaps we are still attached to the idea that enough self-knowledge should eventually produce a more coherent person. We imagine that the contradictions belong to an earlier stage of development and that, after sufficient work, the various pieces will begin behaving themselves.

I have yet to meet anyone for whom this has occurred.

Life without an editor

We have become fond of extracting meaning from difficult experiences. The painful relationship taught us about boundaries. The loss revealed what mattered. The terrible year became the year everything changed.

Sometimes this is exactly what happens. Experience alters us, and looking backwards can reveal patterns that were invisible while we were living them. Meaning can emerge slowly, often in forms we couldn't have manufactured at the time.

But retrospect doesn't always cooperate.

There are periods that remain confusing. Things happen at the wrong time. We make decisions with incomplete information and later discover that more information wouldn't necessarily have helped. Something we thought we had put behind us reappears years later, less finished than advertised.

The language of growth can become surprisingly impatient with this kind of ambiguity. It prefers movement, integration and a useful understanding of what has occurred. We speak of chapters and journeys and becoming, as though life has employed a very conscientious editor.

Real life is less considerate. It leaves loose ends, repeats itself and occasionally spends six months on a subplot nobody requested.

I don't object to looking for meaning. I do question the pressure to produce it, particularly while we are still living through whatever is supposed to become meaningful. There can be something almost extractive about insisting that every painful experience eventually justify itself through personal growth.

Some things will change us without improving us. Some will make sense years later. Others may remain things we wish had not happened.

And there are periods that are simply difficult while we are in them.

They don't need a thesis yet.

When a mess actually needs dealing with

There is, of course, a risk in romanticizing all this.

Not everything should be accepted indefinitely in the name of being gloriously human. Decisions can be avoided for too long. Apologies need making. Behaviour has consequences for other people. A room can reach the point where contemplating its emotional significance is considerably less useful than finding a bin bag.

Self-acceptance does not exempt us from responsibility. What it may change is the amount of shame we require before taking responsibility.

This distinction matters because shame has an extraordinary ability to turn one problem into several. We are exhausted, then furious with ourselves for being exhausted. Indecisive, then embarrassed about the indecision. Lonely, then ashamed that we need anyone. We fall behind on something and spend a remarkable amount of the remaining available energy considering what sort of person gets behind on things.

By then, the original problem has acquired an entourage.

I am increasingly fond of the unremarkable solution when it is available. Send the email. Ask for help. Go to bed. Admit that something isn't working. Deal with the object you have been stepping over for four days instead of continuing to develop a relationship with it.

Practical action can be surprisingly merciful. It doesn't require us to decide what the mess says about our childhood, our character or our prospects for becoming a better person. We can clean something without becoming a tidy person. We can apologize without becoming a bad one. We can change our mind without producing a coherent defence of the person who made the original decision.

Not everything needs to become an identity.

The woman who was supposed to have arrived by now

I suspect many of us carry around an imaginary version of ourselves who is doing rather better.

She isn't spectacular, which would make her easier to dismiss. She is simply more consistent.

She goes to bed when she intends to and uses the food she buys. She doesn't lose entire afternoons to distraction and then become mysteriously industrious at 9:40 p.m. She maintains friendships, exercises appropriately and deals with administrative tasks before they become emotionally significant. She presumably knows where her passport is.

We aren't necessarily expecting to become her immediately. Her arrival is scheduled for some point after the current difficulty passes: after the deadline, the move, the family situation, the demanding period at work. Once we have recovered our energy and established a routine, we will resume being the person we had apparently intended to be.

Then life introduces something else.

This wouldn't matter so much if capacity remained constant, but it doesn't. Bodies change. Relationships rearrange themselves. Work that once energized us can begin to cost more. Systems that worked beautifully in one season become inexplicably useless in another. We may find ourselves trying to run an old life with resources, priorities or circumstances that have quietly changed.

There is often an awkward interval before we understand the new arrangement. During it, we can be remarkably dismissive of the person actually living our life. She is temporary, we tell ourselves. Not quite representative. We will return to the proper version once things settle down.

I have become increasingly suspicious of this.

Not because change is impossible or because we should abandon our intentions, but because the supposedly provisional person keeps turning out to be the one who is here. She is the one eating breakfast, answering the phone, making decisions, getting tired, starting again and living all the ordinary Tuesdays we barely count while waiting for the more organized life to begin.

It seems a little cruel to keep treating her as a draft.

About the word glorious

Glorious is admittedly doing some work in the title.

A lot of mess is not glorious. It is inconvenient, embarrassing or dull. Sometimes it smells peculiar and needs to go in the washing machine. I don't think we need to admire all of it, and I certainly don't want messiness to become one more quality we are expected to perform attractively.

What I want to preserve is affection in the presence of imperfection, including the kind that isn't charming enough to be rebranded as authenticity.

There will always be things worth changing, patterns worth understanding and behaviour we regret. There will also be contradictions that don't resolve neatly and qualities we continue negotiating with for years. This doesn't make the work of understanding ourselves pointless. It may simply mean that self-knowledge was never supposed to culminate in a finished person.

Ordinary life continues in the meantime.

We make dinner while uncertain about the future. We laugh during terrible weeks. We can be deeply perceptive about one part of our lives and spectacularly obtuse about another. Insight coexists quite happily with laundry on the floor.

I find that reassuring, particularly in a culture so interested in healing, optimization and becoming. There is a subtle point at which the desire to grow can turn into an objection to being an unfinished human being.

I don't want to spend my life waiting to graduate from that condition.

After all the work we do to understand ourselves, heal what has hurt us and become more conscious of how we move through the world, we remain people.

Thank goodness.

A perfectly resolved person would be exhausting company.