What A Mess

I just read the most remarkable post on Facebook.  By someone I have never met.  You know how when you don’t adjust your privacy settings appropriately, and everyone in social medialand can see all of your most personal thoughts and emotions?  And you can see theirs?  Even if you’ve never met them before?  Scary right?  I guess it’s the risk we take living in the age of technology.  Anyway, I just saw the most honest words I’ve ever read.  This post said “What a fucking mess I’ve made of my life.”  Soak that in for a minute. 

Suddenly, I was overcome with compassion for a person I’ve never met.  Maybe because I’ve never met her, it’s easier for me to relate to.  I mean for all I know, she’s the most dramatic and manipulative bitch to ever walk the face of the planet.  But knowing nothing more than those words about her, I felt like I knew her, personally. 

Now, be honest.  Who among us hasn’t wallowed so deep in self pity that we haven’t made the exact same statement about our  own lives?  If you think you have not, you’re probably lying.  Every single human being to grace humanity with any sort of consciousness has made the same accusation toward themselves.  Again, if you have not, you are either lying or you’re a sociopath.  Either way, you won’t get this, so don’t waste your time.  But for the rest of us who do get it, I feel like we should applaud this young woman.  Because even though nobody wants to read about that shit on Facebook, we can relate to it.  And, to be honest, it’s kind of refreshing to see someone taking responsibility for their decisions. 

Hard as it may be to believe, I mutter those exact same words to myself almost every day.  That sort of introspection usually comes when something really insignificant happens.  Like when I forgot to put water in the coffee maker or I get a run in my last pair of hose.  Even though I’m pissed because I don’t have any coffee or because I’m going to have to look like a trailer park princess for the rest of the day with my torn stockings, that’s not why I blame myself.  I get pissed because I’m convinced that karma is making me pay for the questionable decisions of my past.  Those times that I really made a fucking mess of my life.  There are many.  We don’t have time, here or now, to recount them all, but if you know a publisher looking for a story about the proverbial train wreck, feel free to drop my name. 

Anyway, back to this post.  “What a fucking mess I’ve made of my life.”  It’s almost like I said it myself.  The words keep resonating in my thoughts.  Right now, I can’t tell you why I thought it was so important to talk about, other than its real.  We spend so much of our time consumed with thinking about how we can make ourselves better.  We spend so much of our being trying to understand why we are stuck in a rut.  Even more time trying to figure out how to get out of the rut.  We look for fault.  We try to place blame.  When it all comes down to brass tacks (that’s a phrase my mom uses a lot.  I never really understood it, but it seems appropriate here), we are the only people responsible for our fate.  Blaming others will get you nowhere.  Blaming your circumstances will get you even less.  Admitting your own role in what inhibits you is a positive and honest step forward.  We’ve all made a fucking mess before.  To be perfectly honest, I would much rather hear someone say “I’m a fucking train wreck, do yourself a favor and steer clear of me right now” than I would hear someone say “My life sucks because of everybody around me sucks.”  We all have shitty people around us sometimes, but we chose to stay around them for a reason.  Most likely, we are that reason. 

When your life becomes a fucking mess, you have two options.  You can either stay stagnant, and reel in it.  Or, you can take a moment to reflect, only a moment though, and then clean it up and do something different.  It’s your mess.  Do with it what you want. 

-Inner Peas