Why Being Messy Makes You Beautiful

​Are you like me? Do you use "how good my life is currently," or "how wonderful I feel," as a barometer for your mental, physical, and spiritual wellbeing? Not to oversimplify, but, for example, do you ever tell yourself, "Today was wonderful, therefore I am definitely a good person."

This way of thinking feels good for a season, but it has another side. If you have a bad day, you enter this Stranger-Things-upside-down dimension where you figure you must have deluded yourself, because you are actually extremely screwed up.

If this is you, you are not alone— I have spent much of my life operating according to this system.

But, friend, what if, instead, you and I learned to integrate all the little pieces of ourselves? What if we were okay with both the lovely and the mess? 

Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book "Learning To Walk In The Dark," says, "To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up. To want a life with only half of these things in it is to want half a life, shutting the other half away where it will not interfere with one's bright fantasies of the way things out to be."

A day would not be complete without a night, and you, fabulous being, wouldn't be whole without your flaws.