I am a mess.

And I don’t mean that in a cute John Green kind of way, I sincerely mean in every aspect of my life, I am a mess. My room is completely disgusting; I, for some reason, cry whenever I see the home décor section at Target; And the only way to describe my romantic life is with the word “yikes.” The thing is, is that I’m not ashamed to be a mess -- in fact, I embrace it. It wasn’t always like that, though.

After high school, I decided to take a semester off -- it was one of the worst decisions of my life, but I did it anyway. However, that’s not the point. The point is that I looked around at all of my friends in college and they all seemed very together, like there were no loose ends. They were all doing these great things: they were joining sororities and fraternities, one of them is getting married in March, another was on that team at UCF that built the robotic arm for the veteran. While they were doing those things, I was sitting in my bed watching Gossip Girl for the third time -- so you can see how it was easy for me to feel incompetent compared to them.

I realized, though, that no one is ever really together, that they’re just really good at pretending that they are. But why pretend? I mean, we’re all pretty young, so it’s okay that we don’t have all of the answers, that we’re not put together, that we’re not these perfect yins and yangs of knowledge and competence. It’s okay to be like a dirty room, to have parts of you strewn everywhere without a rhyme or a reason, or a care. Then some people try to pass their messes off as ‘pretty’, but I can tell you as someone who used to do a lot of drugs, messes are never pretty. Though, I can tell you, like all messes, they eventually get cleaned up. And – God willing – I will be too.