The importance of showing up messy
/The importance of showing up messy
I’m someone who, for the most part, has been able to show up well in my life. I’m pretty presentable. I know how to play well with others. I can get the job done. Not always perfectly, not always the best, but good enough.
One May day in 2020, I woke up and everything changed. I had a cerebrospinal fluid leak, which caused by brain to sag, which prompted a cascade of neurological and physical degeneration over the next 13 months. It was awful, and terrifying. It screwed up my life, and my nervous system. I was conscious, but my brain would fade in and out constantly. I cried and catastrophized frequently, methods my body and brain used to try to find regulation. I was a complete mess. I felt like I was losing my tether to my body and this planet.
Interestingly, I could still show up, albeit in a diminished way. I could still have conversations. I could still garden or make art, some days. I could smile and laugh, sometimes. I grieved with some friends who were also going through difficult challenges. I even navigated the sh!tshow that is health insurance. I was just a complete mess while I did it all.
And this was an important lesson for me:
I’ve learned that showing up messy doesn’t diminish my intelligence.
I’ve learned that showing up in grief doesn’t lessen my impact.
I’ve learned that showing up in tears doesn’t mean I can’t get things done.
I’ve learned that showing up even though I’m a mess doesn’t mean I care any less.
I’ve learned that showing up inconsistently is sometimes me giving 100%.
I’ve learned that showing up scared is actually pretty courageous.
If anything, these messy, inconvenient states remind me of why I’m showing up in the first place: to help and to care, and to normalize helping, caring, grieving, healing—in all realms of our lives. Even when we’re a mess.
This doesn’t mean I don’t need days of respite and solitude—I do.
This doesn’t mean I should push through everything, no matter what—it doesn’t.
This doesn’t mean it’s always a great idea to show up messy—it isn’t.
But there are a lot of stories floating around about how we should “never let them see you sweat,” that emotions are unprofessional, that grief is something to be dealt with… somewhere else, some other time, if at all: we don’t really make time or space for grief—or people experiencing it—in our culture. (And look into the origins of “professionalism” and ask yourself if just maybe we need to update the concept.)
At times, these ideas held me back from showing up, because I didn’t feel I measured up—that my mess, emotional state, ill health, inconsistency was a burden, one to be borne alone, by myself.
But really, these stories are just telling us to turn off our humanity.
To keep us alone, isolated, or shamed by our humanness when we most need to connect with others in it.
To keep the machine running.
I’m not at all interested in performing like a machine. I just can’t live down to that expectation.
I’m bringing human back—to all the places we’ve been told it’s too imperfect to work.
These might just be the spaces we need it most.
And in return…
We need to get comfortable with others showing up messy.
There is a lot going on on the planet. Too much.
If we’re going to move through these times with our humanity intact, we have to create compassionate space for falling apart—for ourselves, and for others.
This can’t be relegated solely to the realm of therapy, counseling, or self-development.
Grief, illness—they don’t care about our timelines. Q4 is irrelevant.
Grief and illness are the disruptive technologies meant to jolt us back into our humanness, and they will show up when and where they please. Maybe in the middle of a Tuesday.
And—if our systems can’t accommodate our humanness… remind me, what is the point of them?
We need leaders in every arena to learn and model how to hold grief, illness, and nervous system dysregulation humanely.
We all need to learn how to do this. There is a lot of grieving and caregiving to be done; this will be anything but convenient.
I truly believe that in some not-so-distant future, organizations will be evaluated by how well they are willing and able to embrace this.
We can’t turn a blind eye to the magnitude of change occurring. I’m not the only one who had a rough few years. Many went through worse than I did, or have been dealing with it for far longer.
It’s an invitation for us all to lean into our humanity, re-learn how to be fully human, and recalibrate our systems so they are in alignment with our full humanness—together.
This is the heart of humanful leadership: our capacity to hold one another in the full spectrum of our humanity—not just the sanitized parts.
It’s a mess. Hold on. Embrace it. And each other.