Sunday Night With John: The Beautiful Mess

The Beautiful Mess

John Paul Derryberry

I slammed my hands on the table as hard as possible without garnering a summons from the human resource office.  This grabbed the attention of the room as intended. I was in the fifteen thousandth meeting about how culture needed to change. We discussed again how to be more client-based and sensitive to the trauma people have experienced. All we heard was the dissection from fake compassionate staff about how it was all so hard to change our approach. Never mind that the method in use now wasn't producing any positive outcomes, it just fit their narrative as to what social work was. That is the honest truth about social work in our culture. It's not about results. It's about fulfilling our description of what people who need services deserve. Our patience, our compassion, our unbiased attention did not make the list before so why should it now? 

It's beyond annoying to continually be in these meetings. I had lost my handle on professionalism for a moment. In the silence between my hand-slam and having all the eyes in the room fixating on me, I had a lucky epiphany. I was going to communicate something more elegant than pure anger. I avoided eye contact with my supervisor who was already signaling displeasure with my table-slam. 

I took a deep breath and climbed my soapbox. "I get that change is hard on all of us, but our first premise when we approach working with people, who struggle with mental health, is that we think it can be clean. It's not clean and it never will be. It's a mess, a big pile of emotional chaos. I for one think that mess is beautiful. We have people working through abandonment, abuse of every variety and they wake up every day and give us the chance to assist them. If I were one of these people, I would say, "screw the human race, it's diseased."  These people had their innocence stolen at an early age, their trust in the most critical people broken, and their success rate in life statistically reduced. But, they decide every morning to try again. If that is not the embodiment of beauty, we are all blind. " 

I have no clue what impact my words had on the group, but the result inside of me was staggering. The notion that mental health is going to be messy stuck in my head forever. I embraced the mess, the beauty of trying again, the magic of the human spirit to not give in to the worst, and the fact we will fail and fail often. Not everyone beats cancer but we rightfully celebrate the fact that everyone fights the diagnosis. Not everyone wins their battle with mental health, but we only praise the people who overcome.  

With this in mind, I'm creating a series entitled: The Beautiful Mess. It will detail ten stories of people whom I saw struggle with mental health, life issues, or other factors that created dilemmas for them.  Yet, I saw them create lasting and beautiful memories for others. I witnessed a person with debilitating voices in their head every day try to make their roommate smile. They could only push aside the voices for so long, but the reason they wanted the voices to go away was to make their roommate, who seldom smiled, smile. When they were successful, they both smiled so big, which quickly turned to laughter, which made me cry.

I have not stayed in touch with these people. I have no clue if they overcame their struggles, if they are still struggling, or if they lost their battle. I will not describe anyone in the sort of detail that allows their identity to be revealed and use the pronoun their to keep their status a secret. But these stories matter because life without struggle is dull. Their presence was messy, yet they created moments of pure beauty. 

You can have your sunsets and sunrises. You can have your perfectly edited and cropped foodie pictures and your night out on the town. Show me the moment after a crisis where someone was screaming about wanting to die. Then they whispered through tears, "thank you," to the person who did not leave their side, and I'll show you a picture worth 10,000 words. 

The Beautiful Mess will start next week.

*To my teacher, social work, therapist and fellow life-long strugglers: if you want to contribute to the beautiful mess series, please contact me at jpderryberry@gmail.com. I would love to expand this series beyond my ten stories and give you my blog space for the week. You can include links that you think are relevant.  My editor and I will decide which stories get used.