Sometimes I wonder if the reason so many of us feel like failures is because we’re accidentally comparing our everyday lives to someone else’s after picture.
🍎 ≠ 🍊 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We celebrate transformations as though they happen in two photographs. Before. After. Almost nobody photographs The During. The blood on the wall because you reached for the light switch before you understood the wound. The room doesn’t look heroic: it’s... interrupted.
The During is not montage; it’s triage. 🩸
Who is posting the towels on the floor? The half-used bandages? The sink you haven’t wiped down because you’re still trying to decide whether you’re badly hurt or just badly shaken?
There is an unspoken resistance to photographing the unphotogenic, and let’s face it: The During has bad teeth. It’s still wearing yesterday’s hospital bracelet. You don’t reach for the camera because you’re still fumbling in the dark to turn on the lights.
You text a friend awkwardly with your other hand: Is this normal?
And the hours spent wondering whether you’re healing or simply learning to live with pain? Hard to say. “Dr. Google will see you now” as you fire up your browser at 2:17 AM. Unfinished is easy to mistake for failing before you give it a beat, take a breath, and eat a snack.
To All the Messy Rooms I’ve Loved Before
On my phone camera roll lives a collection of messy-room pics. In my faves, the defeat is palpable: destruction is the punchline, and I’ll be damned if they aren’t universally HIL-A-RIOUS. “Oh, you think you had a morning? LOL.” Your best move is to document the carnage for posterity, send it to a bestie, shrug, and just go about your day.
The carefully cropped and thoughtfully lit After shot isn’t a permanent state of being. The feng rarely stays shui-ed all day anyway. Messes are made in rooms absorbing illness and grief and parenthood and work and fatigue and ambition and laughter and too much stuff and not enough space and decisions deferred because there were more consequential decisions demanding whatever executive function was not available that day.
The messes get cleared eventually. Some of those rooms changed. Some are changing. Some will probably be messy again by the time I publish this draft. If I’m being completely honest, the After picture doesn’t bring the comfort it used to. It just makes me feel... late.
Late. Still blissfully here. In the present, choosing to be present while the stitches itch and the bruises change color before they disappear. Where progress is invisible from where you landed on the floor. Shed the need to look like the hero. You’re just another jerk doing what it takes to make it to the after party.
Maybe that’s the picture we’ve needed all along. Not because becoming is beautiful, but because that picture is evidence that, against all odds, you have arrived.
