I’m a mess — a hot southern mess.

What on earth does that mean? AND How do I fix it?

I’ll admit it: I’ve been called “a mess” —

And, before I moved to Tennessee, I thought people were talking about my organization skills and the fact that my house was usually a mess. My mom even joked about it when I was a kid: “If someone ever broke in, they would think someone else had been in your room first.”

Now that I live in Tennessee, I can answer to the fact that I truly am “a hot southern mess.” I have been all my life. Even my husband has taken to describing me as a “hot southern mess.”

“But isn’t that name-calling? Aren’t you offended?”

NOPE! I really can’t be because I AM a mess.

I listened the other day to some of the logged calls on A Way with Words. When I got to the mom calling about her daughter being labeled a “hot mess,” I paused. That was me, or rather that sounded like me.

This is the radio show’s hosts description for the slang expression “a hot southern mess.”

A hot mess is a person, despite their personal chaos — despite all the madness that surrounds them (like they are involved in a lot of things, and a lot of balls are being dropped, and deadlines aren’t being met, goals are not being achieved), despite all that, they are still a friend or a romantic partner or someone you want to hang around with.

He went on to give this as an example: “For a lot of people, a hot mess is what you have, imagine you’ve got a pot of hot chili and you drop it on the kitchen floor. It’s a giant mess and you can’t even clean it up because it is hot, it’s steamy hot. And you have to wait for it to cool. and that is the worst kind of mess you can possibly have. It’s a mess that can’t be fixed or even solved. There is affection in using “a hot southern mess” to describe someone.”

Yup, that definitely describes me.

Does it describe you?

Are you involved in lots of stuff?

Do you drop the ball on projects and activities?

Do you sometimes fail to meet deadlines?

Are you falling short of achieving your goals according to your (or someone else’s) time frame?

I have an uncanny knack for making life AND projects way to complicated.

As a person, I’m a mess.

As a creative, I’m a mess.

As a writer, I’m a mess.

As a musician, I’m a mess.

As a person, I’m a mess.

I’ve often described the workings of my mind as a tilt-a-whirl car on a roller coaster track — complete with steep inclines and declines, 90 degree turns, twists, loops, and corkscrews that never seems to come back to the initial platform.

In fact, the other day, my husband said, “You don’t think correctly.” I got offended, initially, because to me it said that my thought processes are wrong. Entirely not true.

I just don’t think like most people. And sometimes, I bounce from topic to topic without much warning.

As a creative, I’m a mess.

I like trying and learning new things. I can go to a craft fair and look at the different artisan booths and in many cases my mind screams, “That is so cool. You could do that. Let’s go home and try NOW!”

It’s why I have so many unfinished projects.

As a writer, I’m a mess.

Again, I can’t sit on one project for very long because there is another one knocking at the front door of my mind. Sometimes it is such a violent, demanding knock that the project I am working on gets scared and retreats into one of the various rooms of my mind.

HOWEVER, being a versatile writer helped me in teaching writing. I held the philosophy with my students that I would not expect them to write anything I couldn’t or wouldn’t attempt myself. And semester after semester — year after year, I wrote the same projects along side my students.

As a musician, I’m a mess.

My husband wears a tattoo that reads: Music is my medicine.

I go a bit further.

As a musician, I play piano (began in 3rd grade) and violin (began in 5th grade) and I am relearning how to play the guitar (began learning on my own in college). My voice is even returning after numerous bouts of bronchitis and laryngitis several years ago. I have even written music.

Music is an integral part of my soul, and without it, my soul would die.

How do I fix it? How do YOU fix it?

Maybe the question should be “Should I fix it?” OR “Should YOU fix it?”

We fix things that are broken, but someone who is a hot southern mess is not necessarily broken. Instead, the hot southern mess is more of a unique diamond in the rough, uncut — unpolished, using life experiences to cut away the garbage and let the true self shine, brilliantly.

As a creative, as a human being, each one of us is a unique precious gem with every person we meet, every relationship we nurture, every experience we endure positively and negatively chipping away at our being to finally uncover the brilliant, valuable gem.

As the excess is cut away through relationships and experience, we become the person we are supposed to become. To fix a hot southern mess before the relationships and experiences have scored the gem is to take short cuts and risk damaging the rock and making the finished product less valuable.

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Rebecca Writes The articles and comments in Rebecca Writes relate to living in this crazy world. Articles about being a parent and grandparent to traveling to relationships to education to health and wellness to being a decent human being — and beyond.

Rebecca (Becky) spent 34 years in a teaching career, but when she retired in 2014, she picked up her pen and pursued her passion to write. As a high school English teacher, Becky held the philosophy that she wouldn’t give any writing assignment that she personally wouldn’t or couldn’t do. That philosophy strengthened and broadened her own writing.

In addition to publishing her writing on various platforms, Becky also blogs at Life is for Living, a blog to encourage, motivate, and help others live the best life possible. As an extension of Life is for Living, she also publishes a weekly newsletter, Let’s Chat. (Check it out HERE.) Life is for Living also has a social media presence with the group Coffee on my Porch. (Check it out HERE.)

After teaching writing for 34 years, Becky began Ink & Keyboard, a blog for writers at all levels. She supplements what she writes on the blog with a subscription newsletter, The Writer’s Notebook (Check it out HERE.), the social media group Ink & Keyboard (Check it out HERE.), and a Medium publication Ink & Keyboard (Check it out HERE.).

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