Life is messy

After writing about how much happier I am at 45 than I was at 25, I realised that I was contradicting myself. I remembered that, not long before, I wrote about how unhappy I was with my bikini body. For sure, that was much better at 25. Re-reading both posts, I wondered if I haven’t been entirely truthful in one or both of them. For how can I be the happiest I have ever been and feel uncomfortable in my own skin. It got me to thinking about how messy life can be.

When I thought about it some more, I realised that contradiction can be found in almost all of my writing. I recently wrote about my unhealthy relationship with food. But how can this be the case when, since I’ve followed the ZOE programme, I have never enjoyed my food more? I’ve written about the anxiety brought on by perimenopause and how I’m scared of everything and still I feel intense joy when my kitten crawls up my sleeping body for her morning cuddle.

The full spectrum

I came to the conclusion that, not only can all of these things be true for me, but that they can all be true at the same time. Isn’t that the wonder of being human? Isn’t that the point? To experience every emotion. To feel it all. And I do feel everything, sometimes all in the same day.

Some of the contradiction comes from getting older. It stands to reason that as you age, you change and grow. I am in a place of transition; straddling the first and second halves of my life. It makes sense then, that I am both longing for the body of my youth whilst also finding beauty in it’s newfound softness. That food tastes delicious but at the same time, eating makes me anxious. That I experience a freedom that I couldn’t at 20, but that I still get anxious.

This is an important realisation for me. Until now, I sort of thought that life was linear. I imagined that I was working towards a future where, if I did everything right, I would be fixed. That I’d be happy all the time.

I thought that life was binary. That you should either feel happy or sad. That any negative emotion: sadness, anxiety, anger, meant that I was doing life wrong. It didn’t occur to me that it was okay to feel the full spectrum of emotions. Or that it was actually healthy to do so.

A messy life is beautiful

I write about how I feel on any given day. I write what comes to me in the moment. I’m realising also, that I write about what I need to understand. I can see now that, of course what I write will be contradictory. Of course my opinions will change over time.

And yes, life is messy. I’ve never been good with messy but… I can also see the beauty in it.