Recently I had to drop some things off to a lovely woman who I know a little bit by virtue of having grown up in the same small town and having some friends in common. She’s one of those people who just radiates warmth and joy, so I was looking forward to this little errand for a rare chance to be in her orbit for a few minutes and have a brief catch-up. When I got there, she invited me inside to her kitchen while we chatted, apologizing fleetingly for the state of it. I told her she hadn’t seen the explosion I had left behind me in my own kitchen before I left, and we laughed about our shared experience of the chaos of everyday life undermining any effort at keeping a tidy house. We spent the next hour or so talking about what was going on in our lives and commiserating over our challenges, and by the time I left her house some time later, I felt lighter.
I had enjoyed this little social call and our wide-ranging conversation, but I also felt a sense of peace and comfort from the lived-in state of her kitchen. It was reassuring. I felt at ease. I felt at home. I felt normal – human in fact. It turned out to be an unexpected opportunity to connect with another person over our shared messiness, and I appreciated the small act of vulnerability that it required of this woman. So often we’re afraid of other people’s judgement, so we madly contort ourselves doing a frenzied pre-clean before visitors come over. The fact that she’d invited me in made me feel either like she trusted me not to judge her, or that fundamentally she was less concerned with judgement than with her own sense of well-being, and in either case I thought it was something wonderfully remarkable.
This whole experience reminded me that we don’t invite people into our messiness nearly enough – the external messiness of our homes, sure, but also our internal messiness. That mess of stuff we’re all carrying inside that makes us feel inadequate, afraid, isolated, and ashamed. We sanitize our internal mess for the outside world in the same way we do the frenzied pre-clean for visitors. We hide our struggles, put the best version of ourselves out into the world, and mask our interior pain, thinking that it will net us approval and acceptance. But in so doing, we’re really hurting ourselves. We’re not only denying or suppressing those painful parts, but we’re missing out on the opportunity for real shared connection, love, and support. What if inviting other people into our mess more often helped us all feel more normal, more human, and less alone? We all have a mess. In letting someone cross the threshold into yours, you might just be giving them the permission they need to make peace with their own.
