You Keep Calling it Chaos. What if it’s Just You?
There’s an abrasive texture to chaos that most people refuse to acknowledge. It's the feeling of having twelve half-conversations with yourself while trying to remember if you paid the electric bill, answered your mother's text, and whether that weird noise your car is making means you're about to break down on the highway. We call this being "scattered", as if we’re browser tabs left open in someone else’s head — but that’s too gentle. This is more like being a radio caught between stations — all static and fragments, searching for a signal that might not even exist.
The standard response is to grip the wheel tighter with both hands. Make lists. Color-code calendars. Download apps that promise to transform your fragmented existence into something resembling competence. These aren’t off the mark, exactly, but they're addressing the wrong problem. They're trying to solve the static by replacing the antenna, when what we really need is to learn how to function inside the noise.
Because here's what nobody wants to tell you: the chaos isn't a bug in your life's operating system. It's the system. The mess isn't what happens when you're doing life wrong — it's what life actually looks like when you're doing it at all. We keep drafting to-do lists like escape plans — as if ticking the boxes might free us from being human.
But let's be practical for a moment, since we're all drowning in our own good intentions. If you're going to make a list, make it long first. Brain-dump everything — the urgent, the ridiculous, the things you've been avoiding for months. Don't prioritise yet. Just let your mind empty itself onto paper like a confession. Then, and only then, pick three things. Not five. Not seven. Three. The rest can wait, because the rest will always be there, and you'll never be done anyway.
The real work isn't in the lists, though. It's in learning to breathe while the world burns around you. It's developing the capacity to function in the middle of your own overwhelm without needing to fix it first. This is a skill nobody teaches you, probably because it sounds too much like giving up. But there's a difference between surrender and collapse. Surrender is active. It's choosing to work with what is rather than exhausting yourself fighting what isn't.
Try this: when you feel that familiar static rising — the mental channel-surfing that means you're about to fragment into a thousand pieces — stop. Not to meditate or center yourself or any of that spiritual theater. Stop to notice what chaos actually feels like in your body. Where does it live? How does it move? What does it want from you?
Most people experience chaos as a threat to be neutralised, but what if it's actually information? What if the feeling of being scattered is your system's way of telling you something important about how you're distributing your energy, your attention, your resources? What if the static is actually a signal?
This isn't about learning to love your dysfunction or celebrating your inability to get your shit together. It’s about recognising the capacity to be present with uncertainty, to function within messiness, to create meaning in the middle of chaos — these are more advanced skills than keeping a bulletproof journal. They're not consolation prizes for people who can't get organised. They're the actual work.
The people who seem to have their lives together aren't living in a different world than you are. They're either better at pretending the chaos doesn't exist, or they've learned to dance with it so skillfully that it looks like control. Under the skin, we’re all improvising. We're all making it up as we go along.
So when everything feels like static, when your life resembles a jigsaw puzzle dumped on the floor, when you can't remember the last time you felt like you knew what you were doing — maybe that's not the problem. Maybe that's just Tuesday. Maybe the question isn't how to make it stop, but how to keep showing up anyway. How to stay tuned in the middle of the static, not in some imagined silence after.
Now we go inward. Ask yourself:
- What part of yourself are you betraying when you label your complexity as "chaos"?
- What is your chaos trying to say — that your control keeps silencing?
- What would it cost you to admit that your scattered state might be your psyche's way of refusing to be reduced to a system?
- And perhaps most importantly: what would become possible if you trusted that your mess contains its own intelligence, even when you can't decode it?
You keep calling it chaos so you don’t have to call it yourself. But what if this isn’t dysfunction at all — just the honest shape of a mind refusing to abandon itself? Because it's not going to pass. This messy, chaotic, beautiful, impossible thing is your life. And somewhere in the static, if you listen carefully enough, you might just hear the signal you've been searching for all along.