Embracing inconsistency and disorganization
this is your sign to NOT clean your place today 😈
Hello! I hope everyone is doing well today.
I feel fine, but today is one of those days that I wish I was more consistent. Someone who could sleep on a regular schedule when faced with stress or someone who can neatly cross things off of a to-do list without navigating through random scribbled notes.
So that’s why I’m talking about why it’s okay to be an inconsistent person. Someone who doesn’t depend on to-do lists or feel like a routine has to dictate their actions.
Because I need that reminder, and maybe you do too.
Is Gen Z Messy?
I know I’M messy, but what about the rest of my generation?
I’ve been seeing a lot of videos on TikTok about 9 to 5ers showing their extremely messy room and saying that no, they don’t have it all together. (why do we still think that people do?)
This “messy girl” aesthetic is really a lot of women who are tired of the ideal of the “picture perfect home” older generations strived to have among families and kids who made messes all the time. It’s a way to say, this is my life, and it’s completely normal because I’m human with a life.
But what about emotional messes? When we have anxiety and fear over the future, or even trauma from our past that still haunts us?
Yeah… Gen Z has that too.
Granted, all generations have trauma. Maybe not all people in those generations have capital T traumas, but we all deal with stress in some form or another. And we all deal with procrastination, inconsistency, and disorganization.
Embracing your chaos, whatever that looks like for you
I read this article on Medium about how humans are not meant to deal with the pressures of today.
It’s too much on our brains. Even for someone without ADHD, neurodiversity, or mental illness, we’re not made for 9 to 5 jobs forever and picture-perfect schedules—despite what the influx of productivity and self-help books tell you.
Some people may be more suited to a routine or a schedule, but if that’s not you, then that’s perfectly fine.
A lot of us (myself included) feel like a failure when we go to our salaried jobs and then in the middle of the day, we feel tired already. Videos on TikTok or Instagram might show some people waking up at 5 am, but some embrace waking up later.
We all operate on our own form of rhythm. So no, we shouldn’t feel shame when we feel tired because things are out of our control. We shouldn’t strive to be anything besides better than the person we used to be.
Saying this feels good in theory, but everyday we wake up and we’re faced with societal pressures of who we should be. Work a 9 to 5 job. Be whoever your dad, mom, or grandparent was. And when we veer off of that routine, it might send waves of panic to whoever thinks you should conform to these ideals.
Where was I going with this? I’m not sure… but some of us might have this intuition that we should forget what people tell us we should be and do this activity instead.
For the longest time, I thought I needed to work 40 hours a week freelancing to be productive. Now I know that I was operating on someone else’s schedule and forgetting what feels good to me. I was ignoring what my chaos was telling me.
So, what does your chaos tell you? Does it tell you to pick up a pen and start writing? Or does it tell you to focus on getting your master’s after putting it off for the 10x time?
Whatever you want to do, feel it, and go for it. It’s okay to do what feels good to you. It’s okay to explore, because maybe you needed it for a long time.