The Best Way To Have An Uncomplicated Life? Be A Complicated Person. No, that’s not backwards. You read it right.
When your podcast centers around “complicated women” you think a lot about complicated. I started noticing that complicated people often have uncomplicated lives, contrary to first impressions. And that uncomplicated people have complicated lives. Is there a correlation?
Kate and I discussed productivity vs. busy-ness on our Untamed episode where I likened myself to a large breed dog. My brain needs a lot of stimulation, the equivalent of a forty-mile walk for Rover, every single day. If I don’t get that mental energy out before bed, I can’t fall asleep. I end up doing the human brain equivalent of gnawing on the floorboards and eating your shoes. In the dark, I unfairly pick apart things in my life that are imperfectly wonderful (nothing is perfect, after all) out of boredom. This is not a good situation. But it happened all the time when I was trying to force myself into the life I had planned.
I blew up that life in phases, and slowly rebuilt the one I really wanted but was too afraid to go after, or not trusting enough to follow. In that process, I learned that it’s better for me to spend my days embracing my own complications.
That means I sit in my closet with my ragtag “altar” and say my own made-up “prayer” or “mantra” — and I also scream and curse when something doesn’t go as expected. I’m a zen hot-head. That means I get equally lost in the bliss of my financial budget and my novel. I’m left-brained and right-brained.
I’m loud and shy. I like to be the center of attention and I’m an introvert. And as my favorite mug proclaims, “I am small and sensitive, but also fight me” under a drawing of a cute cat holding a switchblade. That one’s pretty self-explanatory. The point is, I never force myself to be one thing. I am complicated.
Some people are uncomplicated and live uncomplicated lives. We love those people! Don’t ever change! But more people ARE complicated, and have been taught to repress or reconcile the traits that make them complicated. In turn, that inner dimension comes out sideways: in their outer lives. They cannot sit comfortably with their own depths and dualities, their own complications, so they make their lives complicated. They meddle in other people’s drama. They engage in self-destructive behavior just to have a mess to clean up. Sometimes this dysfunction even parades as “responsibility.” The family daily planners of these people look like color-coded chaos to me now. They fill their every free moment with busy-ness or achievement. I once was that way too.
Magically, when I allowed myself to become complicated, when I embraced all my contradictions, when I stopped looking outside myself for someone to tell me which of my behaviors were harming me and which were good for me, my life became proportionately uncomplicated. I knew who I loved and what I loved to do, what I was passionate about and what challenges were worth the struggle.
Kate and I were preparing to record a new outro for our podcast episodes. At the end of our old one, Kate says, “keep it complicated.” Then we realized all our show notes say “stay complicated.” At first I wasn’t sure which one should stand as our tagline. I liked the alliteration of keep it complicated, but the truth is, I don’t want anyone to keep it complicated. Don’t complicate your life with so much doing that you forget how to be you. All of you, without hiding, ignoring, or fixing any of it. You aren’t broken, you are human. So stay complicated!!