It’s ok to be a mess.
Tags: Black Women, Perspective, Personal Growth, Personal Development

This post is authored by Daphne Larose and was initially published on the Topknot blog on December 15, 2020.

I have spent my whole life trying to have it all together. Growing up, I was a very disciplined kid. I readily internalized criticism and feedback, even when it was not directed towards me. In my ballet classes, I would look out for the corrections my classmates received from the teacher and immediately apply them to myself. I wanted to be perfect. Unsurprisingly, this served me quite well in school and in my dance classes — teachers always loved how quickly I responded to suggestions and how hard I worked to improve myself, and I loved receiving their praise.

This drive for perfection had its roots at home. Like most other Black kids I know, I grew up with my parents giving me their version of the speech Papa Pope gave to Olivia in season 3 of Scandal: “Daph, in this world, you already have 2 strikes against you: you are Black and you are a woman. That means you will need to work twice as hard as everyone else to be successful.” (Turns out there was a third “strike” that showed up later in life when I realized I was exclusively attracted to women, but I think if my parents had known that when I was a kid, it would have ruined the metaphor.) As a kid, I internalized that message as: “you are already two steps behind everyone else; you do not have room to f*ck up.”

These strikes gave me more reason to be even harder on myself. With the pressure of not being allowed to “f*ck up” on my back, I was constantly trying to understand how to avoid being flawed. As a way of learning what not to do, I would carefully listen as my parents gossiped in Creole about young adults who appeared to be announcing a new career every five minutes or causing their parents stress by not seeming to have their life together. I believed that being anything but completely put together was a failure in the eyes of my parents and I vowed never to be that in front of anyone.

Now, as a 32 year old adult, I am finding myself in an interesting and terrifying position. This extreme self-discipline and strong leaning towards people-pleasing is fading away. For the last few years, I have been watching myself in horror as I have been extremely indecisive, signing myself up for things and not following through, letting obligations fall by the wayside because I can’t bring myself to force myself to do something that doesn’t fulfill me — I have become everything that I thought my parents disapproved of. I became what I disapproved of.

And the worst part about it was that I felt completely impotent. My childhood tools of being super hard on myself and scolding myself into submission — my crutches — were no longer effective. I couldn’t keep it all together, I couldn’t look perfect from the outside and hide my process from everyone else. It felt like my mess was spilling out of me at a rate I could not control, knocking down my carefully crafted facade of having my sh*t together. I was watching this mess wreak havoc on my life and I felt powerless to stop it.

Here is the interesting part, though — it turns out this is just what growth looks like. Growth requires messiness because it is messy. It is a perfectly imperfect system. Growth tears everything apart and moves everything around and makes piles of stuff to start organizing life clutter. Like any thorough house cleaning, you have to make a mess before you can put it all back together again. Some of those piles are garbage piles, some of them are “maybe we’ll keep them” piles, some of them are “do not throw away” piles. And, inevitably, some things have to get thrown out because they are taking up valuable space that needs reclaiming. In order to evaluate what I wanted to keep, I had to see everything, the good, the bad, and the otherwise.

For me, throwing stuff away can be the scariest part. The risk of throwing something out and then regretting it later terrifies me. But, I learned that reclaimed space is the best thing I can give myself because it frees me up for the new and the better to flow in. And what does flow in is actually more relevant to who I am right now than what I had in that space before. My house can actually function better for me. That is what growth does.

Now that I understand this, I see how those young adults my parents judged when I was a kid were most likely not the irresponsible flakes disappointing parents everywhere that my parents made them out to be. Those people were growing, and my parents were witnessing it. Everyone’s mess looks different and it’s easy to judge others’ mess when you haven’t accepted your own. I actually applaud those people for not being afraid to show their growth to others, to embrace their growth so fully. I understand now how my identities are not strikes against me but instead wonderful seasonings that make me uniquely me, the things I love most about myself. I am perfectly flawed and joyously not put together. Having it all together is not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s ok to be a mess.