I find my grip loosening on youthful absolutes: solid beliefs about how things should be, who is good, who is bad. I’m slipping into a messier middle where paradoxes and contradictions can exist side-by-side. Multiple things can be true at the same time. And I’m okay with that.

Complexity offers depth. Nuance gives me breath.

The mess of it all doesn’t bother me so much anymore. I feel no compulsion to begin tidying things neatly into boxes, to draw lines and boundaries, to label things. This isn’t a lacking of principles or a giving up on foundational beliefs about myself, others and the world.

No, it’s a kind of realising that this mess is what makes us fully human – the flaws, the contradictions, the multitudes that exist within us and within others. What once felt like hypocrisy now feels like humanity. I’m seeing the beauty in it: being vulnerable AND strong, being brave AND scared, in not making it to the top BUT achieving something anyway, in needing people and independence at the same time.

The other day I put Virginia Woolf’s seminal essay “A Room Of One’s Own” (1929)  into my 15-year-old daughter’s hands. It made me think, here is a woman who embraces imperfection and contradiction. Her work legitimises paradox as truth. She doesn’t feel the need to neatly resolve every contradiction. She just lets it sit.

In “A Room Of One’s Own” she argues for women’s economic independence and personal space. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” She is right of course.

In her own life, however, Woolf’s mental health struggles made her deeply dependent on her husband, Leonard, who managed her time, routines, and even her writing. Their relationship balanced uneasily between control and care. But within that tension, she created work of extraordinary originality that still resonates today. It was an astounding achievement for a woman at a time when women’s writing and work was not given the space and value it deserved.

In an absolutist age of neat manifestos, where inconsistency is so quickly mocked or dismissed, I find Woolf’s own personal contradictions and battles a relief. It adds to my growing embrace of messiness.

Rather than weaken her, those contradictions make her more human, and, to me at least, more trustworthy. She wasn’t a flawless emblem of feminism, she was a woman navigating real constraints, illness and desires and trying to think honestly about them.

She reminds me that to want both care and freedom, connection and solitude, is not a failure of consistency but a part of that wonderful messiness that makes us fully human.

Let’s embrace it. 🌻