The Miss, the Mess, and the Bloom

"Some blooms don’t announce themselves. They rise through the quiet, through the cracks, through the mess, and we notice only when we pause."

                                               

I went out that night for something I had been quietly looking forward to — one of those rare moments that pulls you out of routine and reminds you what it feels like to be excited again. The rain had just passed as I arrived, leaving behind a soft dampness in the air and reflections on the pavement, everything felt hushed, rushed, and strangely dreamy.

I didn’t intend to pause. But I did.

In the middle of all the motion, something soft caught my eye, a still patch of water framed by concrete and glass. I stopped just long enough to take it in: pale lotuses floating gently in a shallow pond, lights flickering softly across the surface, the quiet glide of fish beneath it all.

At the time, I wasn’t even sure what I was seeing. It felt peaceful, so I snapped a photo and moved on.

Later, scrolling through my gallery, that image stopped me again.

A closer look revealed the details I hadn’t noticed in the moment — how still the water was in the quiet that followed the rain, how the blooms rested on the surface with grace, how even in a carefully staged setting, they felt real. And then something stirred in me.

The lotus, timeless in its meaning, reminded me what it stands for: growing through murk, blooming anyway.

It made me think about the parts of my life I’ve tried to overlook — the messy chapters, the quiet aches, the moments I’ve stood in the middle of something meaningful without realizing it.

Truthfully, the past few years have been hard to explain. Not because they were loud or dramatic on the outside, but because they slowly unraveled me from within — most especially during the pandemic. It hit like a pause and a storm at once, stretching time, shrinking joy, and reshaping everything I thought was certain. Missed steps. Misplaced trust. Long nights that blurred into longer days. I lost things — plans, dreams, opportunities, clarity, even parts of myself I thought I knew.

For a long while, I believed I had stumbled too far to recover — that maybe I had wasted too many chances to start again.

But what I’ve come to understand is this: growth doesn’t wait for everything to be neat or perfect. It happens anyway — quietly, persistently, often beneath the surface.

That’s why the lotus moved me. It's a flower that rises from mud and still chooses to bloom. It doesn’t bloom in spite of the murkiness — it blooms through it. And that changes everything.

We tend to think we need calm conditions to become something beautiful, that healing requires peace, that joy can only grow in clarity. But maybe that’s not true. Maybe we bloom best when we’ve learned to root ourselves in messy places.

I used to see my pain as proof that I’d failed. Now I see it as part of the soil that shaped me.

Not all scars fade. Not all wounds close neatly. But that doesn’t make us less worthy of softness or light. Maybe you bloom differently after the breaking but you still bloom.

I’m still learning what it means to carry both regret and resilience. Still figuring out how to sit beside the parts of myself that feel unfinished and still offer them gentleness.

And if you're reading this, wondering whether your mess makes you unworthy of joy or softness, I hope this reminds you:

You don’t have to escape the murk to become something luminous. You only have to keep rising.

Because somewhere beneath all the miss and all the mess, there’s still a bloom in you — something strong, something soft, something quietly becoming whole. - MESSY E.

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