Echoes of a Messy Universe

Witty Banter

This one’s been sitting in the back of my mind for far too long quietly simmering, showing up in the middle of conversations I don’t know how to end. It starts with something small: a friend calling themselves a mess, or someone laughing off their spiralling thoughts with a sigh and a “Sorry, I’m just too much.”

And I get it. The world tells us we need to make sense. That we need to be clean, logical, minimal, the aesthetic of a perfect life, in every thought and feeling. That if we could just sort ourselves out a bit more, we’d be worthy of being loved.

And the thing is I do love perfection. I love clean pages and symmetries. I love things that line up, click into place, fall neatly within patterns. I love the elegance of precision.

But when it comes to people? That’s not where I find perfection.

What I find perfect are the contradictions. The messy middle. The emotional whiplash. The way someone can be quiet one moment and fiercely opinionated the next. The way they carry heartbreak and still choose to be kind. The way they spiral not out of control, but toward something true.

The people I love most aren’t smooth or symmetrical they’re fractal. They break and rebuild. They change their minds and come back to themselves in stranger, truer forms. They’re not perfect in the traditional sense, but to me, that is perfection. So I started wondering: why do we keep trying to make ourselves simple, when everything meaningful in life is layered and difficult and gorgeously contradictory?

Fractals and the Art of falling apart Beautifully 

Let’s start here. There’s a concept in mathematics and nature called a fractal, a pattern that repeats endlessly at every scale. Think snowflakes, river deltas, the veins in a leaf, lightning cracks across the sky. Fractals aren’t neat. They’re not symmetrical. But they are consistent, in their chaos. Zoom in, zoom out it’s still them. Still recognisably their shape, just in a different language.

That’s what you are. A pattern in motion. A self-similarity across time. You collapse and rebuild. You contradict yourself and call it growth. You spiral and still, somehow, return to something essential. You might not be tidy but you are true. The beauty of a fractal is not that it’s flawless, it’s that it’s faithful to itself at every layer. That’s you. Not broken. Not a mistake. Just a human pattern, unfolding in your own rhythm.

You are not supposed to make Sense

There’s this deep cultural obsession with clarity. With fitting ourselves into headlines and clean sentences. But the truth is you are not a spreadsheet. You are not a diagram. You are someone who cries while laughing, who misses what hurt them, who loves without logic, and breaks your own heart and then mends it with laughter. You are contradictions woven together with intention. You want too much. Feel too much. Exist too much. And that’s not something to fix, it’s something to witness. You're a walking fractal: too complex to map in one frame, and too real to flatten. You are not supposed to make sense. You’re supposed to mean something.

Perfection is a Lie with a good PR

We’ve been taught to chase perfection like it’s a virtue, a gold standard of being. But it’s not about wholeness. It’s about control. Perfection, as sold to us, isn’t real. It’s a performance curated, filtered, and approved. It’s rooted in fear: fear of rejection, fear of being misunderstood, fear that unless you’re clean, quiet, and composed, you’re unworthy. It’s not a goal. It’s surveillance turning you into both performer and critic. You monitor your every word, flatten every emotion, smooth every edge until you’re no longer living, just presenting. And we do it so well we forget it's unnatural. We forget we were wild once. Full of contradiction and noise and desire. The culture doesn’t ask us to be ourselves. It asks us to be acceptable. And so we shrink. We filter. We disappear in pursuit of an image that was never ours to begin with. But you were not made to be perfect. You were made to be real. Fractals don’t strive to be smooth, they repeat, they shift, they return. That’s the kind of beauty worth believing in. Not the kind that edits itself but the kind that echoes.

Chaos Is Not the Problem — It’s the Proof

Look around. Not at your screen really look around. Out the window. At your desk. At the world moving in small, imperfect rhythms. Nothing alive is symmetrical. Life isn’t tidy. Trees grow crooked. Roads wind. Emotions erupt at the worst possible times. And still, it works. Not because it's controlled, but because it's constant. We spend so much energy trying to hold it all together trying to make sense of what was never meant to be still. But chaos isn’t failure. Chaos is a signal. It means there is movement. Growth. Resistance. Possibility. Life. Zoom in, and it’s still you. Zoom out, still you. Fractal, not failure.

Why I Love You, Even If You’re Not Perfect

Someone once asked me, “Why do you love me if I’m a mess?” They said it softly, like they already knew the answer or maybe feared it. Like they’d carried that question their whole life, tucked between apologies and overthinking. Like they’d learned, somewhere along the way, that love is a reward for being easy to handle. And in that moment, I wished I could show them how I saw them. Not as a mess. Not as something broken or unfinished. But as a pattern I’ve come to know not predictable, but familiar. The way they spiral when they overthink, the way they soften when no one’s watching, the way their joy spills out too loudly and their sadness lingers too long. How their hands always try to hold more than they should, and their heart opens even when it’s scared.

They think these things make them difficult. I think these things make them human. Because love, the kind that lasts doesn’t come from perfection. It comes from presence. From staying. From watching someone collapse and return to themselves again and again, and thinking, “Yes. Even now. Especially now.” I love them like I love fractals, not because they’re smooth, but because they’re consistent in their depth. Because every version of them, at every scale, is still them. Messy. Honest. Alive.

You don’t love someone because they’re flawless. You love them because they let you see the storm and the stillness. Because they unfold in your presence, unhidden, unedited. Because they return to you, and to themselves, again and again, in ways that don’t always make sense, but always feel true. And really, how could I not love that?

Stop Trying to Erase the Best Parts of Yourself

Let the tape unspool. Let the routine break. Let the painting stay unfinished. Let your laughter echo too long. Let your plans fall apart and be rewritten in real time. Let your life look like something that was lived in. Stop scrubbing yourself down to something digestible. Stop apologising for the noise. Stop trying to be perfect in a way that’s so small it leaves no room for your heart.

You are chaos. 
You are complexity. 
You are contradiction. 
You are alive. 
And maybe that’s the most perfect thing anyone can be.