Growing up with OCD, I liked everything to be clear-cut. Things were either good or bad. Right or wrong. While I wasn’t color blind, I did have a hard time accepting or even recognizing shades of gray in my life. Now, at 32, my life is one big ball of gray. And what’s most surprising is that I’m perfectly okay with that. In fact, I find freedom and self-compassion in no longer having to clearly label everything. By accepting the world as murky, I don’t have to fit all of my own actions into clearly labeled categories. This makes it a whole lot harder to demonize my sense of self. I am not all good or all bad. Like the rest of us, I lie somewhere in the middle.
One of the first times I noticed my newfound ability (and appreciation) for grayness was during the highly uncomfortable process of dating someone new after my broken engagement. I didn’t start dating John once I was fully over my ex-fiancé. I started dating John while I was in the midst of processing an often overwhelming loss. I still missed my ex and I still loved my ex. Yet I was actively falling in love with someone else. In the past, this kind of overlap would have been unconscionable. I would have been a “bad” person. John would have deserved “better than me” even though I was open with him about all of it and he was a consenting adult. But for whatever reason, I let myself continue. I let myself live in a place that might not have been morally wrong but felt morally yucky.
And I’m so glad I did. Because what was my alternative? To end this new relationship before it even had a chance to take off out of some well-intended obligation to have my feelings tied in a bow before moving forward in my life? My relationship with John helped me move on from my ex, not just because I was forming a new connection with him but also because he was my good friend during a really tough time. I honestly don’t know what my recovery would have looked like without him. And it’s a bit scary to think that my need to be “good” and for things to be “clear” almost prevented my healing and our shared future.
Another huge area of my life that firmly, and quite comfortably, lives in the gray is my relationship with comedy partner Gaby. We built Just Between Us on the premise of friendship. And for the first few years, we were best friends. But then the friendship started to fall apart, and I didn’t know what to do. How could we keep the brand and the podcast going if it was all a lie? Wouldn’t that make me a fraud? Turns out, not really. After some tough discussions following our falling out in 2019, Gaby and I didn’t abandon our creative partnership. We just reframed it into a comedy variety show instead of a show about friendship. We might not have immediately and publicly acknowledged that our relationship had drastically changed, but we no longer acted as though we were best friends. We no longer told stories about us hanging out together because we no longer hung out together. But we still played a role in each other’s lives, even if, for a while, there it was purely a business one.
I had never had a relationship go through that kind of transition before and survive. I was either friends with someone or not friends with them. But here was Gaby, a best friend who became a less close friend who became an almost sworn enemy who became a colleague who became a friend again but in a different way than before. Talk about living in the gray! Living through this experience—which would have blown my younger mind--has made me far more open to less clear-cut relationships in general. I no longer feel that if I stop being friends with someone at some point in my life, I need to keep that door closed forever. I also feel more open to the idea of relationships evolving over time. I don’t need to have the same connection with someone in the same exact way for it to be valuable. And I can more easily forgive people from my past and let them back into my present because actions I once saw as “undeniably bad” are now “undeniably nuanced” in my mind.
It's hard to overstate how big a transition accepting gray is in my life. I used to not be able to tell my parents I loved them because I didn’t “know” what love was and I didn’t want to lie. Any sort of moral ambiguity was intolerable for me. Now, I not only live in the gray, I flourish in it. Do I still think some things are abhorrently bad and other things are universally good? Absolutely. The difference is the shrinking numbers of both. All our lives are messy and filled with things that are hard to define. Releasing myself from needing to categorize everything has not only saved me considerable energy, it’s also allowed me richer experiences. I didn’t let my moral rigidity prevent me from nurturing my romantic relationship and I didn’t let my fear of “misleading” people stop me from continuing a creative partnership that has been the backbone of my career. I let myself play around in the mess instead of running from it. (This is extra impressive when you factor in my contamination OCD!) In many ways it is easier when things are all good or all bad, but the reality is that few things in life are. Once we accept that as fact, we can start to loosen the hold we have over ourselves and over other people to be all one thing.
xoxo,
A
Allison, your lovely post reminds me of song lyrics from the late, great, Mr. Rogers (as in Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.) “The very same people who are good sometimes, Are the very same people who are bad sometimes” I periodically recall these lines when a more base part of myself seems on the verge of manifesting - forgiveness for being human. In fact, it just occurred to me that these song lyrics are the TV-land version of lovingkindness meditation!
Loved this post. I have a sometimes overwhelming fear of gray areas. Moral ambiguity is my nightmare, so much so that I wake up with guilt that I can’t even assign a reason to. I’m turning 26 in less than a month, and I’ve decided to forgive myself for everything that I’ve done that was “gray” in my past (my brain hadn’t even finished developing!) I hope I can take some of your ideas about letting go of moral rigidity into my next 26 years!