Permission to Be a Mess
Have you ever found yourself at the edge of a dance floor, wanting to participate, but not wanting to be the first one? You want to dance, but you don’t want to look goofy. What about the company’s coming over cleaning rush, because how dare they see the laundry that’s been sitting on your couch for a week or the dirty dishes that you haven’t gotten to yet? I didn’t understand the rush to clean for company when I was little, because if they were our friends, would they really care? I get it as an adult though, it’s not really about the company, it’s about wanting to show them our best when they come over. We want to look put together. We don’t want people to see our messy chaos about as much as we don’t want to look silly at a dance or a wedding reception.
There’s something magic that happens when you let people see the real you though. Without the filters and carefully curated image and immaculately cleaned home. The more you let people into your life, the more you let them see you as you, the goofy, the imperfections and all, the more they let you in too. Building authentic relationships is a reciprocal practice, and it can be as scary as being the first one on a dance floor, but it’s rewarding. Some of my best friendships have been maintained by sporadic facetime calls while we’re both putting up laundry. I’ve watched connections be built in seconds while one mom helped another one that she’d never met, because one let another in during an imperfect moment.
It can be easy to forget that behind the screens or the superficial exchanges of, “I’m good, how are you?” other people are still living their messy, imperfect lives the same as you and I. So, the next time you want to host a dinner party or be the first one to dance or try something new, because you’re worried about what other people think, worried that you won’t be good enough, or worried that people will judge you, remember that when you give yourself permission to show up fully, and authentically in all your imperfections, you are giving the people around you permission to do the same, and that’s a beautiful thing.
Besides, at the end of the day, would you rather be lonely but have your perfect image or have a handful of friends with hearts full of memories of the good and the bad that you went through together? In the end, nobody is going to remember if your dishes were always done when they went to visit, but they’ll remember your hospitality, how you opened your home again and again when they needed it. They won’t remember your silly dance moves, but they will remember that you helped them be brave enough to get on the floor and dance.
Take the risks, give yourself and those around you permission to be messy and imperfect. Life with a perfect image gets boring anyways.
“Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly”
