Messy middle

There is a note in my phone from earlier this year that just says, “LinkedIn is like fucking Severance”. If you’ve seen the show, you’ll know it’s about a workplace where employees are surgically separated from their personal lives—a somewhat creepy reminder of how we often compartmentalize ourselves.

I jotted that note down while scrolling through the platform a couple months after going through one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. While this is not the time or place to go into great detail on the trauma itself, I will share for those of you who do not already know that it involved much loss—of life, of relationships, of a particular future I was imagining.

After leaving my job at the end of 2023, I had felt pressure to stay relevant by maintaining a presence on LinkedIn. But scrolling through a feed of polished updates, motivational quotes, and advice, I felt like an alien. Grief and trauma had left me raw and unfiltered, and this buttoned up positivity felt like a glaring contrast to the messiness of my experience.

It’s obviously not only LinkedIn where we share a tailored version of our realities. I do, however, find the way we use the platform to be an obvious window into the ways we cordon parts of our experiences off. Fear, shame, and grief are transformed into inspiring lessons before they are deemed worthy of sharing.

This transformation reflects a reluctance I think many of us share, of allowing ourselves to be seen when we are in the thick of it. We require ourselves to come out the other side before expressing something; avoiding sharing from the messy middle, even when we feel like we are in a perpetual state of messy middle.

How many times have I done this in relationship? In creative expression? For fuck’s sake, I even catch myself doing it with MYSELF–only acknowledging parts of me that fit the image I have of myself, or the image I want to have.

Not allowing myself to have needs, because I want to be easygoing–to the point where I legitimately forget I have needs until I’ve blown past them.

Not allowing myself to create unless it can be perfect.

Not allowing my own anger to exist without reasoning it away, or taming it into something acceptable.

This is not to say I think the world is a safe enough place to be a completely open book all the time. We don’t owe anyone, well, anything.

What I do believe is that when we are able to reach out from that place of uncertainty, or reach in toward that shakiness, we are more intimately in touch with our own and others’ humanity.

The healing adventure this year has started me down is all about this messiness…

How to see healing not as transcending pain, not as getting over an experience, but as integrating it into the whole. How to expand the whole to make space for shattered, hot, flailing parts of ourselves that we might usually try to shove away.

It is not linear. It is painful and frustrating at times. This shit is messy AF.