So is…this just my life now?

Pure, unadulterated chaos 🤌🏽

Currently: waiting to have a blood test

Reading: The Jigsaw Man by Nadine Matheson, probably the least Christmas-appropriate book on my shelf but I am both deeply disturbed and enthralled

Watching: The Morning Show on Apple TV (my free trial just auto renewed, so I guess I’m finishing this thing by force 🥲)

Listening: Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd by Lana Del Rey

Thinking: what is the best cooking strategy so that Christmas dinner is ready at a reasonable time?

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When I think back to being a child, it’s not that I believed that the adults in my life were great at having their ish together, I just never thought about them long enough to consider what was really going on with them.

I was your average child, primarily concerned with the things I wanted and how much the rules I was expected to follow kept me from them. And anyway, those adults knew how to do all this complicated stuff like maintain a car and what to buy when we went food shopping and what interests rates meant. They were fine.

Now I’m an adult and I realise that they had less control over their lives than I took for granted. They too were navigating a world determined by things outside of their making. But instead of rules made by (mostly) rational human beings to govern the small and quantifiable world of children, they were navigating the chaos that is the world at large.

The greatest myth perpetuated about adulthood is that having more control over your life, means that you will have more control in general. Now I realise that being ‘good’ at adulthood is basically the equivalent of managing to keep your umbrella from blowing inside out in the midst of a gale force, apocalyptic storm.

It has been a personally chaotic and slightly unhinged end to a generally tough year for everyone I know. Now is when people start recounting publicly and privately all their highlights and wins. Two highlights that immediately come to mind are travelling to South Africa with my kids – my first time leaving the country in four years – and finishing my second novel, a book that I’m so proud of I feel giddy.

But as I sit waiting for my seventh blood test in the past two weeks, the biggest win that keeps coming to my mind is how it feels like I’ve finally come to a place where I can embrace – OK, that’s too strong a word… a place where I can accept the chaos.

I spent a lot of my twenties waiting for “the dust to settle”. It never settled. At one point I described my life as feeling like I was lurching from one emergency to another; always dancing on the brink of catastrophe. I honestly stopped making long term plans because what was the point? “Where do you see yourself in five years?” I legit couldn’t see beyond the next six months.

Part of this was a form of self preservation (less expectations equals less disappointment), but also it felt like I was stuck in an unwinnable battle between myself and chaos. They was no way I could fight the chaos and pursue my dreams and desires, there just wasn’t enough energy. But now, I feel like this was fundamentally a misunderstanding of the realities of life.

My ever evolving understanding believes that chaos is just a part of it. It is like the side dish that comes with the main; it is what it is. Perhaps a more philosophically advanced version of myself could even pinpoint the way chaos complements the more orderly, pleasant part of our lives, but I’m not there yet so I won’t try and beg it.

There is something freeing in accepting that chaos will always be there and it doesn’t have to be an existential threat just by default. My life doesn’t have to pause, waiting for the mythical “ideal circumstances” to do whatever I want to do.

But of course, there are levels to chaos. Some things are fundamentally life-threatening, and sometimes you do need to tap out of “keep calm and carry on” in order to deal with whatever grenade has been launched into your life from the ether. May those times be rare and short, and may we have the support system and appropriate coping strategies to see us through.

I honestly pray that 2024 is cakewalk. I pray that it is nothing but sunshine and rainbows and candy floss. But I’m grown enough to know that some level of chaos is a given and the year ahead will have its share of tests and challenges and “Nah, God! Why me?!” moments. Some might mistake that for pessimism, but I’m still excited. “Everyone wants happiness, nobody wants pain, but you can’t have a rainbow without a little rain.” (Apparently Dolly Parton said that.)

Not quite a rainbow, but still a stunning combination of water vapor and sunshine that I came across on one of my morning walks.