What Happens When We Mess Up

I messed up. Or at least, it’s my first impulse to say that. I accidentally sent out two different versions of my Substack post last week, and as soon as I realized I’d done that, my inner Cruella stirred. Darling, she purred, you always do things like this. How could you be so careless? What will people think?

I hated revealing the messiness of my process. I wanted to deliver only the polished product.

It didn’t take me long to see the lessons in this.

We long to be the finished product. The shiny version. The best version.

That’s fine, but challenges begin when we seek to be the finished product all the time. Then we quit risking, quit putting ourselves out there and braving something new—because what if we fall? What if we fail? Who will see? What will they think?

And it’s not just the finished product we are after—it’s the perfect product, which we know is impossible, and yet society and social media perniciously promise us otherwise.

I just finished teaching a class on race and gender, and in their final speeches, many of the young women talked about how the expectation of perfection makes it exhausting to be a female.

This generation not only has to manage their faces and lives in real time with the human in front of them, but they also have to manage the unending and ever-shifting demands of all the different platforms all over the world. Is it any wonder they are haunted by anxiety?

Is it any wonder they (and so many of us) long to be product? Something certain. Something finished, done, because then all will be well, right?

While that might feel safest, easiest, the image that comes to mind is a mosquito caught in amber. Is that how we want to live? A life forever frozen? A hollow shell, powerless and stuck until the end of time?

Process, on the other hand, moves—from now to next, from is to will be.

Process is potential, possibility. It is river, gathering all that is and carrying it along its Way. There is flow and energy, movement and power.

And yes, mess, because rivers can flood, just as they can be nothing but mud and muck, dust and detritus.

As I was writing this, I learned a synonym for mess is chance-medley. A collection of who knows and how long and what now and no going back.

It’s hard to say yes to that, but if we do not want to live small and stuck, we must risk mess (and the possible haunting of our very own Cruellas whenever we put ourselves out there and things go sideways). We have to be willing to reveal that we are process and not product, willing to revel in that.

Time to get our courage on and join the chance-medley. The what now and what next. No going back.