Feeling messed up is not the same thing as messing up. People can feel like something is wrong with them regardless of whether they’ve made any mistakes.
Who is to say when a person feels messed up? It’s up to them. It’s not a medical or psychological diagnosis, but an improvised self-assessment. When people say that they feel messed up, they mean that something in their conscious experience isn’t right. That may seem to be an ambiguous definition, but ambiguity is a part of this emotion. People who feel messed up can’t put their finger on what’s wrong, exactly, as much as they struggle to name their problem. They just know that there’s something not right with them, as if their very psychological identities are under threat, having been tossed into a jumble.
There’s no stereotypical facial expression that represents feeling messed up. A person can feel messed up while appearing just as usual to others. Although people can accuse each other of being messed up, at its heart, feeling messed up is not a social condition. It’s an internal experience.
Why do people spend so much time feeling messed up? Maybe it has something to do with the common expectation that people should have their lives figured out and put together. Influencers, celebrities, and thought leaders put on a show of confidence, but are careful to edit out less than flattering moments from their public personas. As a result, the most widely seen models of a human life are mess-free, neat and tidy.
The ideal of the tidy life has recently enjoyed a great deal of popular attention. Authors like Marie Kondo have advised us that messes hold us back from our potential greatness.
Actually, messes are healthy for us, at least in some respects. The use of the word mess to refer to untidy things originated from the description of a well-balanced diet. Mess originally referred to food, which is why institutional places for eating are sometimes called mess halls. A meal with a number of different ingredients cast together looked messy, but provided a wide range of nutritional benefits.
A few years ago, research by psychologist Kathleen Vohs suggested that while working at tidy desks makes people more likely to engage in behaviors that contribute to the well-being of society, working at messy desks makes people more likely to engage in creative behaviors and to try new things.
Could it be that when we feel messed up, it’s a manifestation of some kind of inner conflict between our desire to fulfill social obligations and our yearning for a creative life? It’s hard to say for sure when you’re feeling messed up. Everything’s jumbled together. The individual bits of the experience could be nourish us on their own, but they’re disorganized. Nothing is in its place, and so a tidy resolution of it all is both within our grasp and out of reach.
