The Messy Middle

There is always this tension between saying too much and truthfully saying anything at all. Especially anything that contradicted or challenged the norm. There is always risk in speaking honestly, particularly when what you are saying does not fit neatly into what is professionally digestible, institutionally comfortable, or socially approved.

I also don’t see the point in constantly censoring thoughts, sanding down convictions, or reshaping language into something more palatable simply to preserve approval. Sometimes the truth of an experience, a system, a contradiction, or a realization is uncomfortable to hear because life itself is uncomfortable to live through. 

What I’ve learned throughout my life and career is that authenticity is often romanticized until it carries consequence. People celebrate boldness abstractly, but materially, there are often penalties for saying what you actually think, especially when it unsettles expectations or challenges systems people are invested in protecting. 

The fear of speaking honestly is often tied to fear of failure, rejection, and consequence. 

Success and failure exist on opposite ends of a spectrum that society obsessively reinforces. One is glorified. The other is condemned. We are taught to chase one relentlessly and fear the other at all costs. But the older I get, the more I wonder what exists in the space between both extremes.

The messy middle.

The place where there is no complete attachment to either outcome.

What would happen if we stopped allowing success or failure to become our governing authority? Who would we become if we created, explored, experimented, failed, evolved, and tried again without allowing either triumph or disappointment to define our entire identity?

Becoming overly attached to either outcome creates a fearful existence. Fear of failure keeps people from beginning. Fear of success keeps people afraid of transformation, visibility, responsibility, or change. Both can quietly limit a person’s life.

But there is something freeing about remaining in motion anyway.

About going all in on something that matters while also accepting that the method may change, the direction may evolve, and the outcome may not resemble what we originally imagined. That is not failure. That is living. That is remaining open enough to let experience shape you instead of calcifying into rigidity out of fear.

What if success and failure were never meant to exist as opposites at all? What if both coexist naturally throughout a lifetime? What if failure is not always destruction, but information? What if success is not always fulfillment, but simply another phase of becoming?

I do not know where any of this leads. I do not know if everything I am building, writing, creating, or pursuing will work out in the way I imagine. That uncertainty is both exciting and terrifying. But maybe that is the point.

I would rather work relentlessly toward something that matters to me, speak honestly, remain open to being wrong, and live fully inside the uncertainty than spend my life trying to perfectly manage perception, avoid discomfort, or guarantee outcomes that were never guaranteed to begin with.

There is something deeply human about the messy middle.

And maybe that is where life actually exists. 

MDE

Follow me on Substack to for Bi-monthly insights to understand the ideas that shaped this piece.