How I Became The Messy Human
Plus 5 Gentle Shifts to get past Emotional Hijackings
In late 2021, I got off a Zoom call with a group of old friends, devastated.
The call had been filled with toddler appearances, the chaos of small tantrums, and above all, a rigid cheerfulness that was no match for the underlying angst of young mothers who have lost some piece of their old life to motherhood.
There was also another emotional beast hiding among us. One of the women had recently lost a close relative to a terminal illness. She was going through grief, of course, and also deep sadness about the painful state of her relationship with this relative just before their passing, and some unexpected hurt on top, which had to do with the way her extended family was handling things in the aftermath.
But our group of friends did not speak openly about her loss.
The call was a holiday Zoom, and, perhaps as a result, everyone edited out anything but the positives, including myself. This self-imposed group-mute left me feeling hollow.
It was hard to keep the smile on my face.
Since that night, multiple women from this group have talked with me about our tendency to edit out the difficult topics when we gather, and how we need to collectively stop editing. How we need to say the hard things in order to support each other through them.
But that night, we weren’t there yet. And I stayed as silent as the rest.
My downfall
One of the woman in the group texted me near the end of our Zoom call.
“Stay on the line after?” she asked. We were the only two singles of the crowd, so we often supported each other in extra ways. Her ask wasn’t unusual.
But that night, after our forcedly upbeat gathering, I wasn’t in a mental state fit for a tet-a-tet. I knew I should decline.
Not only had glossing over our friend’s loss hurt my heart, there was an added twist for me personally. As each friend provided Instagram-ready, cherry-on-top life updates, I didn’t see room to share what was honestly going on in my own life either.
I’d recently gone through a break up of a significant relationship, and was deep in my own strange grieving over the loss of a future that I’d thought included marriage, a home, and kids. And in my late thirties, the loss felt especially acute. The update I gave on the line, however, was entirely about my new adventures and an upcoming trip. I felt invisible.
As the call ended, my chest was tight and I’d overheated. I needed to move, to shake it out. And to cry. My temples hurt with the pressure of all the feels. My eyes burned.
I knew I should tell my single friend I needed to sign off, that I couldn’t stay on with her after. It was late, so I had an excuse.
But I said yes, not wanting to be rude.
Almost as soon as the group hung up, my feelings let loose in a big way, spewing anger and sadness and loneliness and disbelief in less than productive ways. I say my feelings let loose— not me— because nothing about it felt like my decision. It was pure reaction. Not a mindful response.
But my red hot hurt must have burned through the screen and read like anger. I could see the expression on my friend’s face change from one of eagerness to one of horror.
Even amidst the wild abandon of my outburst, I could hear the embarrassed phrase in my head. “Oh my god, you’re yelling at her.”
To be clear, I wasn’t yelling about her. Everything I said was about my experience. But her reaction was clear enough. I’d crossed a line by venting this way.
I apologized with stilted words and signed off, feeling a shame spiral coming on as the screen went black.
My dark night
I thought I had come so far over the past six years. Ever since my divorce six years prior, I’d been focusing on personal development and emotional intelligence practices. I’d also begun a rapid career progression around that time, which required even more intentional growth on my part.
Hadn’t I learned anything at all?
The mean-girl in my head whispered this: “You’re bad. That’s the real you. You’re an angry, jealous, selfish, hotheaded mess. It’s hypocritical to pretend you’re anything else. It’s hypocritical to ever let yourself seem happy, upbeat, peaceful, joyful, or kind. You’d only be acting fake.”
I worried that my friend might never see me the same way after my angry outburst. If I showed up happy on a call with her in the future, she might think I was a fraud.
I tucked myself into bed, miserable. But I couldn’t sleep.
I lay awake in the dark wanting to wake up feeling good again the next day, but not sure if was allowed to feel good again after what I’d just done.
Sounds a bit bananas, right? But in that moment, the logic seemed completely sound.
Have you ever found yourself in a shame spiral after making a mistake or having an emotional outburst? If so, you probably know how I was feeling.
My Transformation Moment
My inner critic kept at me for a while. By the middle of the night I was exhausted and frustrated. I sat up in bed and burst into tears. For a couple of minutes, my face streamed with wetness, and my shoulders shook. Then, as the tears flooded out of me, so did the tension of the experience, and my mind started to clear.
That was when I began to recognize that I had the chance to shift out of my misery.
The Gentle Shift
Looking back, there were five key shifts that took me from shame spiral back to safety:
Shift one: Let your emotions out. Cry if you need to. Stomp your feet if it feels right. Punch a pillow. Scream into the void. Swear in the shower. Let the feeling out in a safe way, in a safe space, to clear it from your body and mind. Make room for new feelings and ideas.
Once I’d cried, I realized I had learned something with all my efforts at personal growth, because right then I caught my inner mean-girl in the act. I noticed what she was saying about me and I cut her off.
I knew from my past personal work this was a moment in which I had a choice to let go of the shame, embarrassment, hurt, and anger, and choose another state.
One of the tools I’d adopted into my toolkit over the years was the tapping meditation.
Tapping meditations are great for people like me who struggle with meditation when they are experiencing big emotions. Big emotions often make me want to move around (which is completely normal, since they’re connected to evolutionary survival mechanisms, including the fight-or-flight system).
So the process of tapping two fingers against the side of my hands, my forehead, temples, upper lip, chin, collar bone, armpit, and head not only released tension at pressure points, it also kept my body occupied so my mind could focus on a mantra.
That night I chose a free five minute meditation from The Tapping Solution app, called “Turn Your Day Around.” Here is the transcript:
“On this glorious day I’ve been gifted, I set the intention to create a great day. I release any negative expectations about today. I decide now, in this moment, how I want to feel and what I want to experience. I release the past. I release the future. I enter my precious now, full of joy and love. I can create a great day, full of grace, full of synchronicity, full of joy, full of peace, full of effortless action, creating what I want, moment by moment. Visualizing what I want to create today, I don’t worry about what I’m going to do today, I’m thinking about who I want to be today, how I want to be today, how I want to feel today. Energized, peaceful, joyful, all of it at once? See yourself today, navigating the day full of presence and peace. So relaxed, see your day full of presence and peace. Make this day that you want a reality. Do it now, creating what you want, relaxing your body, in control of your emotions. Feel that peace in every cell of your body, now. Feeling so strong, so safe, so confident, so aligned with what I want to create, today. Feel the peace in your body and your heart. Carry this peace with you all day. Today you can be the light. You can experience the day, the emotions, the freedom that you want.”
The music in the background was soft and soothing. The narrator’s voice was slow. Tap by tap against my skin, I sank into my body. And I spoke the words aloud after the narrator, as reverently as he did.
By the time the meditation was over, I sat in the darkness feeling relieved. My mood shifted. Then lifted. I felt lighter. My body was fully relaxed. My head no longer hurt.
Shift two: Find a new perspective and refocus your mind. A meditation, particularly one with a mantra or positive statements, can be very helpful. Writing out new self talk could also work here, or setting an intention.
My insight
I saw clearly by then that my night had been disrupted only by a feeling and my reaction to it, and it said nothing about who I was as a person. Feelings were temporary and passing. Reactions were too.
I’d already known, at least intellectually, that my feelings were not me. That they were nothing more than biological reactions. They said nothing about who I was, or whether I had to feel the same way tomorrow, or the next day, or even two minutes from now.
But now that I felt the shift, I knew this truth in my body too. I knew it from experience. I knew it with the kind of inner knowing that Glennon Doyle talks about in her book “Untamed.”
Shift three: De-identify with your feelings. They are not WHO you are. They are temporary and passing, and merely based in biology. While you can't avoid having them, you can separate them from your identity and see them with awareness, mindfulness, and even some distance.
I had certainly reacted regrettably in the face of my big, bad feelings. But with my newfound knowing, I felt clear that my poor reaction didn’t mean these feelings were my new truth. I didn’t have to adopt an identity as a bad person. The reaction did not define me.
I knew I could go back to being my usual, more evolved, more mindful self. I could go back to having thoughtful responses to my feelings instead of knee-jerk reactions.
Plus, I could do it right away, and this quick shift didn’t make me a hypocrite. It made me a messy but resilient human being.
These thoughts opened up a new level of self acceptance inside me. I was okay. I’d had a bad reaction but I was still me. I was still a good person.
I felt myself connecting to a bigger sense of a collective humanity. We all had these experiences. I was not alone. Warmth filled me. I was swept with a deep intuitive knowing that the cycle of being a messy human was natural and fine.
Shift four: Release any shame and find new self acceptance in the fact that all of us experience hard feelings. And we all make mistakes. We all react badly sometimes. But this does not make us bad at the core. It does not change our identity if we choose not to allow it. Instead we can choose to learn lessons from our mistakes and pick a better way next time.
Would I achieve perfection in my ability to maintain good feelings? Doubtful. (Nor even truly desirable).
But I could certainly improve my ability to work through the hard feelings at speed and in real time. I did not need to berate myself for having difficult feelings.
Would I achieve a 100% mindful response rate to my emotions? Unlikely.
But I could certainly continue to work on getting closer and closer. I did not need to label myself a hypocrite or bad person when knee-jerk reactions happened. I needed to recognize what had gone wrong and take appropriate actions to make amends and do better the next time.
I’d keep growing, and I’d also keep experiencing both high and low moments.
I would continue to work on myself. I would continue to adopt better behavior around boundaries, communication, vulnerability, and responding to my own feelings.
But I saw I could not conduct this process linearly or perfectly. Mistakes would be made. Regrettable incidents would occur. And I’d always experience big feelings. I could accept this and forgive myself for it.
I took this experience as a lesson for the future. The next time I felt a group of friends going into self-imposed silence about something important, I decided I’d gently speak up.
And the next time I felt a red flag pop up about how unwieldy my feelings had become, I wouldn’t say yes to a one-on-one with a friend if it didn’t feel right. I would communicate my real needs.
For me in this moment, one final question remained: would my future missteps derail my overall progress or not?
Now that I saw I could let myself off without punishment, I knew I could shift out of moments like this more gently. It meant I could shift much more quickly too, because I would not need to go through such a shame spiral first. Going forward, I would waste less time stuck in the dark places.
In that moment, sitting in the dark contemplating what I’d just experienced, the Messy Human was born.
Shift five: Embrace the cycle of being human with all its high highs and low lows, proud moments and embarrassing missteps. The cycle does not mean you are not growing. It means you are endlessly given opportunities to grow.
Living as a Messy Human
That night I had become more self accepting. I accepted that I was a work-in-progress, always. I had become willing to more gently shift when I needed to, and to do it again and again for the rest of my life.
Two days later I took off for a four month solo trek across Latin America, feeling ready to welcome in the world and all its people and experiences. The lessons I’d just learned stayed with me, and the trip became a time of newfound openness, adjusting boundaries, fresh connection, and a discovery of much greater peace.
I had more lessons to go before I wholeheartedly accepted my own human messiness, but I was on my way.
The 5 Shifts Recap:
Let your emotions out. Let the feeling out in a safe way in a safe space to clear it from your body and mind and make room for new feelings and ideas.
Find a new perspective. A mantra meditation can be helpful. Writing out new self talk could also work, or setting an intention.
De-identify with your feelings. They are not who you are. They are temporary and passing.
Release any shame and find new self acceptance in the fact that all of us experience hard feelings, make mistakes, and react badly sometimes. But this does not make us bad at the core.
Embrace the cycle of being human, with all its high highs and low lows, proud moments and embarrassing missteps. The cycle does not mean you are not growing. It means you are endlessly given opportunities to grow.
Gentle shifting, my LOver-achievers!
-Marisol