Comfortable chaos seems like a contradiction. How can chaos be comfortable? Isn’t chaos inherently uncomfortable? Well, yes and no. It can be uncomfortable in that it may affect your life in unpredictable ways, but for a lot of people, that’s normal. Chaos is comfortable for them because it’s just normal for them.
Instead of feeling comfortable when things are quiet and peaceful, they wait in anticipation for the other shoe to drop. They’re just waiting for something to go wrong, for everything to explode, and for life to return to something chaotic. As a result, they often self-sabotage if that comfortable chaos isn’t happening soon enough.
However, comfortable chaos is not something you can build a stable, happy life on. In fact, there are several uncomfortable truths you should know about comfortable chaos.
1. You are under the illusion of control through the familiarity of chaos.
Living in comfortable chaos feels like you have control because you’re so familiar with it. You may know how to handle it when your life is on fire because it’s been on fire so many times before that you’re just familiar with how that works. By and large, you know what to expect because many unhealthy patterns tend to repeat themselves.
That becomes a big issue when you’re trying to build peace and stability because one thing you have to come to understand is that ultimately, we don’t have control. Something is going to come along and disrupt that peace, sooner or later. That’s much scarier if you haven’t had a lot of peace in your life, because you’re not as experienced with putting the pieces back together in a healthier way.
The good news is that it’s actually not as hard to put the pieces of broken stability back together as it is broken chaos. There are typically fewer things going wrong, which makes it easier to manage.
2. You confuse drama with depth.
As a person with Bipolar Disorder, I often found myself confusing the raw, brilliant emotions that come with mental and emotional instability as something deep and meaningful. However, that’s just not accurate. Sometimes it’s true. But sometimes, unwellness and chaos only felt deep and powerful because the mental illness was causing me to overreact to people and situations.
True depth, however, can’t live in that space, because true depth and intimacy are based on familiarity and stability. You get to know something or someone, so it becomes familiar, and it brings you closer together as you learn the intricacies and details that make that something truly unique.
Big emotions and drama don’t mean that something you’re experiencing is deep. You can toss a match toward a puddle of gasoline, and it’ll flare up, then almost immediately burn out. The same is true with a lot of chaotic emotions.
3. You romanticize struggle.
It is an unfortunate truth that so many people seem to romanticize pain and suffering as a means of character building and “understanding” the world. As the Mayo Clinic informs us, prolonged struggle does more harm than good. For example, people who live in extended poverty can develop complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), experience higher cortisol levels, and shortened lifespans from the stress of not knowing how to make ends meet.
Still, those of us who have survived hard times – myself included – can make the mistake of thinking this somehow makes us wiser or better than others. Sure, you may know some things that other people don’t. It’s helpful to know how to navigate life when life isn’t going well. However, being in a chaotic space is not glamorous and shouldn’t be desirable for anyone.
It’s terrible. It’s terrible not to know how you’re going to pay your rent, buy food, or buy a gallon of gas after you’ve rifled through your couch for whatever spare change you can muster. It’s not character building. In fact, it just makes many people much worse than they were before.
4. You create bonds through shared dysfunction.
There’s a lot to be said for being around other people who have gone through the struggles that you’ve faced. It’s comforting to know that other people have gone through similar, even if it would be better than no one did. However, some people fall into the habit of only bonding with people through shared dysfunction.
That’s a problem because it’s not healthy.
Believe it or not, there are far more emotionally healthy people out there than you may realize. And speaking from personal experience, I didn’t even realize that was a thing until I dated a woman with no trauma in her life. It was surreal because it was almost like she lived in a different world with other healthy people.
The one thing I learned from that is that when you are chaotic, emotionally healthy and balanced people keep you at arm’s length. In fact, if you think about it, that’s what the mental health industry tells us – have healthy boundaries so other people’s chaos doesn’t tear down your life.
5. You mistake anxiety for intuition.
Many people confuse their anxiety with gut instinct or intuition. You can see this at work in spaces with empaths who believe they can feel what other people are feeling, but are still somehow taken advantage of regularly by malicious people. It’s such a trope in that space that you will often hear people say, “Empaths attract narcissists.”
In many cases, what’s actually happening is an anxiety response. It’s common for child abuse survivors to develop hyper-vigilance and sensitivity to disturbances in others’ emotional states. It was a habit their brain was forced to develop to best avoid being abused as a child. The brain wants to detect that change in emotional temperature so it can tell you to avoid the situation.
The problem is that this trauma response can’t differentiate between good and bad fluctuations in emotional temperature. So, someone who thinks of that as some kind of empath-related ability is bound to make many bad mistakes and miss opportunities because their mind is interpreting good anxiety as danger and vice versa.
6. You may self-sabotage to avoid stillness.
People who are too comfortable in chaos often self-sabotage because the stillness and quiet make them uncomfortable. They live in a heightened state of anticipation, waiting for something to go wrong. If something doesn’t go wrong, they may instead opt to cause a problem as a means of self-soothing.
As a result, they may have a chaotic personal life where they can’t maintain employment, healthy relationships, or they engage in substance abuse because they are chasing the feelings associated with that chaos. If things go right for too long, they may become suspicious that something is wrong and inadvertently make something go wrong in the process.
7. You may be afraid of losing your identity without chaos.
Some people who live in chaos for a long time allow it to define them. They say they are just a free-spirited partier, or someone who can’t be tamed. In reality, it’s not that they are necessarily choosing that way of life; they are just continuously imposing it on themselves for their own sense of identity.
If they are known as the free-spirited partier, well, that’s a pretty cool thing to be known as, isn’t it? Other people envy that sort of identity, and it can look like a great thing if you’re not all that free-spirited. However, sooner or later, most people do want to settle down because you can’t build in chaos.
It may be that you need to disconnect yourself and your identity from your comfortable chaos if you want to grow and evolve as a person.
Final thoughts…
Chaos becomes comfortable when you let yourself stew in it. The inconsistency and unpredictability are comforting because you know that you can’t really rely on anything to be stable. It’s an unhealthy coping mechanism that many people who have similar chaos going on within them engage in.
Stability, consistency, and wellness challenge you to create and accept a new reality, that of stability. You can’t build anything of value and meaning on chaos. Sooner or later, it just crumbles; either from outside forces you can’t control that knock it over, or from self-sabotage.
It takes time and effort to accept a different reality. Once you find comfort in stability, you’ll wonder how you ever did without it.
