the messy middle
have you ever done a house project where it has to get worse before it gets better? Life is this way - here's what I mean:
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Take our basement for example - we pulled down the ceiling in order to create the exposed beams look. There was a time where we were covereddddd in dust. Ceiling was on the floor. Then we had to dust and cobweb and close your eyes and vacuum out all of the icky that was in between the ceiling beams. And then we had to tape off the walls so that we could spray the ceiling with that grey paint. And we got covered in that grey paint too
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And then we noticed that the walls were peeling paint (and our taping wasn't quite as good as it could have been - my bad). So we decided to paint the walls too. But first we had to scrape the current paint off where we could, sand the walls and then finally paint them.
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And then we noticed the floors - and we were tired so we put a rug down and called it a day (for now).
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The point of my story is when we see the finished project we forget all of the sh!t we had to go through to get there. We forget the messy middle.
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And when we're in the messy middle - I get that sometimes it's hard to know the project will get finished. It's so easy to get frustrated or overwhelmed with the mess (I've been here!). And when someone else sees your messy middle, they might not know how to react - and that brings in all the shame, should have had this cleaned up, etc.
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But in order to get to the pretty end, we have to go through the messy middle. It's a prerequisite. And it sucks. But it's there.
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And it means nothing about you. You're a bada$$ for being willing to go through the mess to get to the other side.
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I'm a messy middle fellow warrior and here for you if you want support. Because going through it alone feels so tough - I get it. I'm here to help. Check out this link to work with me.