HOW I MET MY VOICE & CREATED BEAUTIFULMESS

I posted it in 2009 according to Facebook, but I’m sure I wrote it far earlier than that. Maybe it feels much older because it was written in the stars lifetimes ago and my heart carried that all the way into this lifetime – passing it over to that swift moment when I finally penned it down.

I’m talking about the piece that inspired me to create BeautifulMess.

No.

It is in fact the piece that created BeautifulMess. The piece that showed me to myself for the first time.

I’m talking about the piece that wrote me.

I lost the original paper that I wrote it on. How beautiful that I captured it through the good old-fashioned style of pen to paper. That’s probably what made it so comfortable to pour out of me. Because it did indeed pour out of me. Quickly. Certainly. Spontaneously.

When I read over it, I was excited that I could finally describe myself. It felt like me. I could relate to the “I” that repeatedly showed up to claim things for me.

My God, I actually existed!

This girl who wouldn’t dare speak unless she was forced to, and who thought that there wasn’t much to her, had described herself swiftly and certainly. I wasn’t so dead after all and that surprised me.

I couldn’t find the electronic document anywhere either. I knew I had once shared it as a Facebook note, but I couldn’t access the notes feature anymore, so it had to live in me as a memory. I didn’t dare recreate it even though I remembered some of it. I couldn’t.

But last week, I found it – on 08/08/2022 (If you know, you know).

I finally found it!

In fact, it found me. It appeared on my timeline as a Facebook memory (the only thing I go onto my personal Facebook page for really).  I have engaged with Facebook’s memories feature ever since it started, but I had never come across the piece until now. It came back to me thirteen years later. My heart almost stopped; it was like finding a treasure. I quickly grabbed it as if it may just suddenly run out of my phone.

Now I can share it again, with BeautifulMess having gained a beautiful family and me finally being the very things I claimed about myself in the piece. I claimed them long before I had the guts to embody them and long before I even knew what I was saying with those words.

So here it is. That thing I scribbled when I was a teenager. Here is the scribble that created BeautifulMess:

I collected that name and buried it in the soil of my being where it would whisper to me every so often. I didn’t share it with anybody for years.

It was the name.

For what? I had no idea.

But it was the name.

It wasn’t even a revolutionary name. It was so common and general. That didn’t matter because I would constantly revolutionalise myself through it. It would be the name of my voice, whenever that came out.

The voice did eventually come out and the name was there to offer it a place of shelter. The voice turned out to be my ancestor’s voice too and that’s part of why I couldn’t do much with it back then.

The rest is history. But it’s also the present and future. Possibly eternity.

This is how BeautifulMess was born.

Whatever your thing is, no matter how unclear and big it still is to you, give it a name.

That’s the first step.  

Teach this to your children too.