Oops I did it again

Cleaning up my own messes

I’ve been working with my sister, who is an online fitness & nutrition coach, to help her create a cookbook. I‘ve stepped in at a very early stage and she has loads of photos that need to be mapped to recipes, recipes that need to be written, proofread, and many other things before we can even think about putting it all together. It’s quite the process, and a bit messy, but it’s certainly doable. It just takes time.

There’s many other tasks that come to mind when I think about messes: The kitchen after I cook dinner, my email inbox after ignoring it for days while on vacation, my hair when I wake up in the morning. Most of these tasks are not impossible (the jury is still out on taming my hair), but they do require time and the ability to dive in the mess head-on to solve the problem.

The aforementioned messes are felt often, perhaps even daily. And I’m pretty accustomed to tackling them by now. I clean the kitchen and put dishes in the wash, delete and respond to emails to manage my inbox, and successfully tame my hair… most of the time. They’re not that big of a deal.

However, I’ve felt like my life is a bit messy recently, and that feels not only uncomfortable, but incredibly unsolvable.

I have found myself asking, “What the fuck am I doing?” to myself a lot. I ask while I open a book I’m reading for fun as my boyfriend leaves for work at 8am. Again, as I leave my apartment at 10am to walk a leisurely 20 minutes to the gym. I ask it once more, as I hop on a Lime Bike at 3pm to run a random errand. And finally, as I tuck myself into bed, I ask it once more.

The question is asked in varying tones: a gleeful shout that I’ve escaped corporate America, thank fuck! And shrouded in judgement that I’m not doing something “on-paper” with the next few months before grad school to advance my life.

And to be fair, I think both of these emotions are valid. I’m unemployed and living off my savings while traveling Europe with my bf before taking on a considerable amount of debt for a graduate program to live out my dream of becoming a therapist. Long sentence, I know, it’s a lot!

That being said, I have been thinking about the statement, “my life is a mess” and how I’ve approached it. It’s felt resigned to failure rather than how I’ve thought of messes like, “Jeez, I really need to clean my room.”

All of the messes I described at the beginning of this ramble are solve-able problems: my sister’s cookbook complexities, my kitchen counter, too many unread emails and frizzy hair.

These can be cleaned up, finished, enhanced and maybe even made better! So, if I feel like my life has been “messy” recently, can’t I, clean that up too?

The answer to me, feels like yes, duh.

So here I am, reminding myself that messes happen. When they happen, they can be cleaned. They’ll likely happen again. It’s a somewhat Sisyphus cycle, but that’s showbiz.

If I seek answers to my big life questions, I must tackle the chaos head-on, even with a little trepidation, that’s ok, I’m still moving forward. As I wade in the overwhelm, it will make sense. Chaos always creates clarity.

Xo,

Anna