When Lola Young accepted her Grammy this year for Best Pop Solo Performance, she didn’t have a speech prepared. In a room full of prominent players and high expectations, she beautifully and nervously shrugged it off, saying, “you know, it’s messy.” By that time I was already in love with the song, Messy, and had added it to this year’s playlist. I even bragged to the other BRAs about being so hip that I had added a Grammy winning song. But seeing her acceptance speech made me love her, and the song, even more. There was something so confident in the way Lola brushed off not being prepared, not being perfect, and allowed herself to be openly messy. I immediately started thinking about this article.
Messy is one of my most uncomfortable places, as I think it is for many women, especially of my generation (Gen X, baby!) and older. It’s funny because, as I’ve written about before, I don’t consider myself a high achiever or an overachiever, but I do draw the line at showing the messy side of my life. Aren’t girls, and the women they grow into, supposed to live in pretty tiny boxes with everything in order and a smile on their face?
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot while watching the TV series Mad Men. There is a lot to take away from that show: the smoking, the drinking in the office, the amazing costumes, and, of course, the intense chauvinism oozing out of nearly every male character. But what I keep coming back to are the women. The housewives with their pearls, high heels, and perfectly coiffed hair. Their lives are extremely messy, but they are the picture of grace and refinement. Watching Mad Men led me to rewatch this clip from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel that has stuck with me for years. The lengths women will go to in order to appear perfect and unmessy is amazing to me.
Obviously, these are television shows, but I’m not convinced they’re all that exaggerated. It reminds me of the book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, which explores the worlds of women’s gymnastics and ballet. The premise is that these worlds place enormous value on girls and women who are tiny, cute, ultra-feminine, and seemingly perfect. Wrapped up in a bow. Tucked neatly into a box. Not allowed to be fully realized people, just pretty keepsakes.
Add to this the countless magazine covers of women airbrushed to an unrealistic level of perfection and the multi-billion dollar beauty, skincare, and fitness industries, and it becomes easier to understand why so many girls and women struggle with body image, body dysmorphia, and eating disorders.
But it’s not just our bodies, it’s generations of women who don’t know who they really are because society has taught them they have to be so many things – but all on opposing and polarizing sides of the scale and always we have to fit into a pretty, tiny box with a label on it. We need to be scrappy and fight like a girl while being a princess in all pink. We have to be prudish but a little slutty, bitchy but let people walk all over us, demure and timid but a boss lady. Nurturing and mothering and somehow responsible for everyone’s feelings but never being allowed time to nurture ourselves – and in charge of EVERYTHING all the time. And, when all of this is said and done, we are to quietly drift into our Crone era as if we haven’t been carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders for decades.
Rarely are girls and women allowed to be messy, which is another way of saying allowed to be fully rounded people. Maybe that’s why one line from Lola’s song keeps looping through my head:
“I want to be me,
is that not allowed?”
I know that Lola’s song is speaking specifically to a male-female relationship, but that lyric feels bigger than that to me. It feels like a question women have been asking for generations.
Is that not allowed? Can I not just be me – warts and blemishes, sass and fear – a full person that society accepts as I am? Am I only female and feminine if I fit into a pretty little box that society created long before I was born? And, more importantly, how do we, as women, let go of this narrative, personally and collectively? How do we allow ourselves and other women the space, grace, and freedom to show up however they want? How do we do the internal work of quieting the striving mind while also doing the external work of…well, burning it all down and rebuilding it from a place of compassion and individual strength?
I have lots of thoughts on burning it all down, but, for today, let’s focus on what it means to do the internal work. It means dropping the comparisons. It means focusing on what’s important to us and our personal values – not those of the beauty industry (or the self-help industry, TikTok, our parents, and a thousand other voices telling us who we should be). What if we were more in touch with ourselves so we knew our values and could see the gaps? What if we gave ourselves time and space to hear what we really want and were able to tune out the external noise?
For me, that internal work starts with reconnecting to myself before trying to change anything around me. Or, as the BRAs say, Unplugging and Elevating. Because what’s possible when we unplug? Deeper connection with ourselves. Truly hearing our wants, needs, desires, and concerns. Being grounded in confidence while calming our nervous system so we can react in healthy ways to the highly stimulated world around us.
Once we’ve tasted that grounding, we can move to elevating. By connecting to our values – and acting on these commitments to ourselves – we move forward with confidence instead of staying stuck. We find joy and movement and renewed energy to work on what matters most to us.
When we unplug and elevate, we stop trying to eliminate our messiness and start appreciating it. We stop seeing our contradictions as flaws and start recognizing them as part of what makes us human. A whole society of women embracing the beautiful and complex messes that they are – that we all are – is far more powerful than any night cream.
“I want to be me” has been my rally cry (silently screamed in my head) for decades. And I believe it has been the silent rally cry of women throughout centuries. As Walt Whitman wrote in Song of Myself, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” And sometimes those multitudes are firing on all cylinders and sometimes they are a bunch of messy contradictions. And that’s ok.
That’s what it means to be a woman – a human. It’s sorting through those contradictions, playing with the messiness, purging what doesn’t serve you, honoring what does, and being proud to be the glorious and unique combination of all those messy pieces.
Journal Prompts: