Making the mess beautiful
How to let the good live alongside the trouble; how to make a life that honors its preciousness
Hello + happy Tuesday!
A friend of mine just got back after three week’s off grid, and said, “I heard I missed an assassination attempt?” and I responded with, “honestly, at this point it feels like just another day.”
UNPRECEDENTED, on the daily.
Hope you all are hanging in. Here in my orbit, I’ve been gathering around the internet bonfire with my fellow summer campers. I’m grateful for the grounding and creative force.
How are you all hanging in?
Today’s inspiration:
Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be Gods.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Becoming an integrated, whole person is an endlessly messy process and it’s only when you accept—and not only accept, but embrace—this messiness as a function of change, rather than something that change will finally rid you of, that your experience of life transforms.
This transformation can be true regardless of whether or not your external circumstances change as a result.
Changing your life takes far longer than you think it should, or would like it to. The path is a spiral, not a straight line, which is a soft way of saying that this work often feels like one step forward, two steps back. Building new habits—both external, physical habits, and the internal work of practicing new thought habits—takes so much time, and the journey is rife with failure upon failure upon failure: you choose the harmful thing, again. You fuck the wrong person, again. You lose yourself online, you lose yourself in substance, or food, or control, or a nice mixture of a few of these things, your own unique to you combo-platter of coping skills that served you well until it didn’t.
And then one day you find yourself living in the uncomfortable gap that exists between who you want to be // how you want to live // how you want to feel, and your behavior, which is confusing and frustrating and maybe even frightening. In the gap between who you want to be and how you’re behaving is of course shame, and self-loathing, and lack, and neglect. In the gap, negativity bias rules the day, and access to pleasure and goodness and joy and beauty are fleeting and superficial experiences. Burnout is common. Numbing out, too. Anger and rage spill out sideways. Your reactions to basic life stuff become disproportionate to what is actually happening.
Being a human is hard. This is true whether you choose to step into the uncharted waters of change, or stay swimming in the comfort of what is known. The difference is what becomes available to you as the result of either of these efforts.
There is nothing sexy or glamorous about this. What you’re likely to see displayed on social media are the results of change, but rarely the process of change itself. You see what it looks like once a person has gotten to the other side. What you don’t see is the messiness: the painstaking stacking of minuscule successes cultivated slowly, slowly over time; the missteps and fumbles and slips and spirals; the vulnerability hangovers; the lonely nights alone; the foot-in-mouth moments; the awkwardness of figuring out how to move through the world as a turtle without a shell.
The mess is not for public consumption. The mess is for you, and for your most trusted people (it is vital that you find your people—even one person who gets you is enough); for pen and paper; for canvas and song; for the earth you walk on, that which has bore witness to it all and will continue to, no matter how many times you fall, which you will, and this is guaranteed.
(And you see why I have a challenging time with marketing.)
So many of you live your lives beholden to the beast of perfectionism. You are either flying high on success, or wallowing in the muck of failure. You forget that you are just as human as the next person, and so you stay at the mercy of the inner pendulum bandying you back and forth perpetually between extremes. Binaries are not helpful here. Fixating on extremes means missing out on all the everything happening in between extremes, which is to say, missing out on life, which is to say, missing out on aliveness and connection and vitality and creativity and relationships and boldness and self-expression and belonging, and giving yourself enough space and grace to start making different fucking choices for yourself.
The point is not to eradicate the mess. This is a futile pursuit. And the reason it’s futile is because life will never not be messy.
The point is to make the mess beautiful.
Making the mess beautiful is connecting to how precious every single moment is. And before I go full Mary Oliver on you, let me acknowledge that I know you can’t stay inside that preciousness all the time, and this is because you have to, you know, be a responsible adult or whatever. But making that connection means that you begin to notice moments of preciousness when they show up. You recognize preciousness in your own little life, in your environment, in the people around you. You develop a capacity to notice love and joy and beauty and delight and truth and goodness no matter the chaos. You let yourself be with your life as it is, rather than what you wish it could be or what it used to be.
This is not a bypassing. This is not a call to stick your head in the clouds. Noticing beauty does not disappear the pain and trouble of life. But allowing what is good and true and beautiful to live alongside the trouble is how you make a life that honors life’s preciousness. You become embedded in reality, not an idea of reality, and this translates to staying engaged to what matters most to you, which is how you participate in making a difference in the world. And I know you reading this, like me, are longing for a different world, and you want to participate in that unfolding, and you want to die a good death, one where you can look back and say sure, I was a productive member of society, but also, I laughed like a maniac every chance I got and the people I loved most will remember me with tenderness in their hearts and yes, moving through the world as a turtle without a shell opened me up to pain and hurt, but that pain and hurt was chased by pleasure and delight in equal measure and I don’t regret a thing, I’d do it all again in a second.
If life is hard either way, why wouldn’t you place your effort in such a way that goodness and beauty and ease and satisfaction become possible, not as a fixed state, which, if only, but as friendly waters you can dip yourself in as-needed. You practice being with life as it is so even when your heart is breaking, which it will, you are still stuffing your nose in the idiotic magnolia blossoms and crying over the ruby throat of a hummingbird and eliciting smiles by making stupid faces at your friend’s baby and getting down on the floor with the dog and wrestling around and yes, those are tears, yes, you are crying, because you are in love with everything.
Originally I thought this post was going to be about my social media hiatus, and maybe it is, if only tangentially. I hope what is illustrated here is how impossible it is to translate the wonder of my work into an Instagram reel. I am not interested in showcasing the work of change as a pretty, polished, palatable post. And the deeper I go into this entrepreneurship experiment, the less aligned it feels to spend my time chasing an algorithm.
What I am interested in is building relationships, and that includes a relationship with you, dear reader. As I move into year three (!) of being fully self-employed, I’m longing to show up here in the fullness of my humanity. To prove that I don’t need a niche, or a “target market.” That even here, in business, I can continue my discipleship into a different way of being, that one that reminds me that life is a partner to be trusted, not an antagonist to be controlled, managed, manipulated, coerced. And this is the invitation I extend to you.
So, I’m leap-of-faithing. I’m sure I’ll return to my socials—just not as like, a strategy. I want to see if it’s possible to build something deeply good and meaningful without looking at what other people are doing, without perpetuating the urgency spiral that makes so many of us sick. I want to do what I do, to tell the stories that are on my heart, to carry the torch for messiness and mayhem and mud, to make this one of the warmest corners of the internet and to invite you into the mud with me.
If you’re curious, please consider scheduling some time with me—I’d love to know how I might continue to shape my work around this community’s heart, and how I might get to know you and your unique needs. These aren’t sales calls—truly just a way for us to connect and see how I might support you at this moment in time.
With all my warmth,
Dani
SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA.
Click here to learn about working with me 1:1 and/or here to sign up for a complimentary Alignment Session. Let’s talk!
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All of this. Thank you Dani 🧡
Beautiful, inspiring words as always. Wish I could have joined summer camp! Love and miss you my friend and hope our paths cross soon ❤️