The bean bag crunches underneath me. The noise seems frivolous and invasive when staring hopelessly at a blank screen. When every word you write is erased because it doesn’t seem true or real.

With not much to my knowledge except my own lived experience, I’ve come to believe that it is part of the human experience to feel like a fraud. To feel like what is showing on the outside doesn’t match what’s on the inside.

We’ve felt it when we’ve woken from a night of bad dreams, listless and tired, dragging ourselves off into our days with the corners of our lips sewed into smiles and voices injected with artificial enthusiasm.

We’ve felt it as we’ve painted over our faces and drawn sleeves down our limbs to cover the tired skin, the dry skin, the hair-covered skin, the picked-at skin, the scarred skin. As though skin could ever be the measure of a soul.

We’ve felt it as we’ve tossed, Good, thanks. And you? to every How are you? thrown kindly but carelessly in our direction, wondering why we persist in asking each other a question to which the appropriate response is so often a lie.

We’ve felt it as we’ve scrolled back through the highlights of our lives – the smiles, the sunshine, the posed, the filtered – remembering what lay beneath and between each carefully curated post.

It’s a black feeling, to feel that what others are seeing might just be different to who you really are. And there’s nothing quite like the claustrophobia you feel when you go to reach out but find yourself grazing your fingers against rough brick wall. The wall you’ve built with each attempt to protect the world from seeing the mess of a broken human being. Or are we really just protecting ourselves?

My brain wanders slowly around the question and I come to this answer: To remove the bricks from the wall is to admit that we are messy. And there’s hardly a more inconvenient truth than that.

Yet I can’t help but think that we respond to the inconvenience by adopting the thinking that was convenient for us as children: Put all the toys under the bed. Shove all the clothes into a drawer. The mess can be ignored if it cannot be seen.

But sooner or later the mess will always be found and it’s then we realise that messy is hard work.

Messy requires patience. And most importantly, messy doesn’t always make sense.

So next time I find myself staring frustratedly at a blank page, or deleting sentences that don’t quite seem to say what I want them to say, I’ll try to remind myself that I’m wading into the mess. And the mess won’t always fit neatly into one sentence – but the mess is where I am. It’s where we all are. And I hope to live my life dragging it out from underneath the bed, sharing, sorting and questioning – for as long as I have breath.