Showing Up Messy

I’m historically practiced at prioritizing ease and smoothness in all areas of my life, though I’ve since shifted my priorities. I think about how I used to manage my tone in conflict before I even fully understood what I felt, and would edit myself ahead of time (and in real time) so I could enact a sense of control over how I was received. This smoothness didn’t provide me with the safety I thought it would; it only led to feeling unseen and misunderstood, and like my feelings would continue to fester inside of me. My true experiences were internalized for fear of being seen as too much.

Gratefully, my friends and loved ones have created a safer space to help me navigate conflict. I learned that expressing my true self and the messiness and complexity meant the right people would stick around and navigate it with me. With time and experience, I finally felt the courage to share what I was feeling in an imperfect way without rehearsing first. When it was received with grace and patience, this is where real intimacy and trust were built. I started to feel resiliency in a real, embodied way for the first time.

You might be curious as to why I’m talking about relational conflict on a Substack about indulging in your creative practice? Well, I think art is one of those places where we can sit with the unresolved without rushing to fix it. This is an internal practice where we can challenge inklings towards urgency and perfectionism. Our own personal creative practice allows us to navigate the mess within ourselves first, allowing us to extend this practice outward.

Freedom in our creative practice doesn’t come from chasing the perfect approach; it comes from the moments where we choose to navigate through the mess. The written piece that went through thirty drafts, the untouched zine ideas sitting in your notes graveyard, a half-finished painting you later donated. This expands our own capacity for what we can hold, pushing our technique and skill, prompting us to problem-solve, and fostering a curiosity to experiment with new ways of being.

Hope is generated in this place; it doesn’t occur in the absence of mess, but is evidence that we navigated through it. Each half-finished project becomes a practice for possibility, and proof that we can sit within failure and try again. Because hope isn’t a feeling we wait for, it’s what we’re left with after moving through something difficult and coming out intact. Hope is the trust built from having survived the process before, knowing we can survive it again.

When we are unable to tolerate friction, we are choosing control over freedom. The process of rupture and repair allows us the opportunity to fall apart and expand ourselves in the process. How we show up in our creative practice is a mirror for how we engage with our own liberatory practice.

Some prompts to sit with:

• Do I ever allow my creative process to feel messy?
• Where have I mistaken smoothness for safety?
• What have I made recently that I let stay unresolved, instead of forcing it toward a neat ending?