The Direct Message
Tension: The funniest person in a friend group is often the one carrying the most unacknowledged pain, because their humor creates an illusion of resilience that prevents anyone from checking on them.
Noise: Society classifies humor as a ‘mature’ defense mechanism and celebrates those who wield it, conflating comedic skill with emotional well-being and rewarding the performance that keeps the real person invisible.
Direct Message: The joke was never about making people laugh — it was about making sure they stayed. And the only person who knows the difference between genuine resilience and skilled deflection is the one who can’t stop performing.
Every DMNews article follows The Direct Message methodology.
I keep my apartment meticulously organized. Every book has its place, every surface stays clear, my calendar runs in color-coded blocks. Yet I also keep a go-bag in my closet, cash hidden in three different places, and I’ve never signed a lease longer than a year.
This contradiction used to confuse me until I understood what it really was: the signature of someone who learned early that chaos could arrive at any moment, so you better be ready for it while also trying desperately to keep it at bay.
When normal isn’t normal
Growing up, I thought everyone’s mother reorganized the kitchen cabinets at 2 AM when she couldn’t sleep. I thought all families had unspoken rules about which topics would cause an explosion and which parent’s mood determined whether dinner would be silent or shouty. The thing about chaos is that when you’re raised in it, it doesn’t feel chaotic. It just feels like Tuesday.
Kaytee Gillis, LCSW, captured something I’ve seen in my own life and in twelve years of clinical practice: “We don’t question ‘normal’ until life hands us a counterexample; for many of us, that is when we leave home.”
That counterexample hit me in college when I spent Thanksgiving with a friend’s family. They had disagreements that didn’t turn into three-day silent treatments. The mother’s anxiety about hosting didn’t transform the entire household into a minefield. I remember sitting at their table, watching them pass dishes and gently tease each other, and feeling like I’d discovered that gravity worked differently in other people’s houses.
The paradox of finally getting what you wanted
After my divorce, I created the ordered life I’d always craved. No more negotiating someone else’s chaos, no more managing another person’s unprocessed emotions. Just me, my routines, and blessed predictability. I color-coded my calendar. I meal-prepped on Sundays. I had a cleaning schedule that would make Marie Kondo proud.
And I was crawling out of my skin.
The silence in my apartment felt wrong, like the pause before something terrible happens. I found myself creating small emergencies just to feel normal again: starting projects with impossible deadlines, dating people who were clearly unavailable, adopting a cat with significant behavioral issues (Bowlby has since mellowed, but those first months were something).
We who grew up in chaos develop this maddening duality. We desperately want peace while being neurologically wired for crisis. Our nervous systems learned to surf cortisol and adrenaline the way other kids learned to ride bikes. Take away the waves, and we feel like we’re drowning in the calm.
Building bridges between both worlds
The clinical term for what happens to kids in chaotic environments is “hypervigilance,” but that word doesn’t capture the full picture. It’s more like developing a sixth sense for emotional weather patterns. You learn to read the microexpressions that predict a storm. You become an expert at managing other people’s feelings before they even know they have them. You get so good at anticipating and preventing disasters that a life without that constant threat feels empty, almost meaningless.
I had a client once who described it perfectly: “I feel most like myself when everything’s falling apart because that’s when I know exactly what to do.”
This isn’t about being addicted to drama, though that’s what people who didn’t grow up this way often think. It’s about competence. When you spend your childhood becoming an expert at navigating chaos, ordinary life can feel like being a trained surgeon asked to spend your days folding towels. You’re grateful for the peace, but also deeply underutilized.
The work is holding both truths
After years of thinking I had to choose between chaos and order, I’ve learned the work is actually about something else entirely. It’s about expanding your nervous system’s definition of normal to include both states. It’s about learning that safety doesn’t require constant vigilance and that calm doesn’t mean something terrible is about to happen.
I still keep my go-bag, but now it lives in the back of the closet, not by the door. I still maintain my routines, but I can miss a Sunday meal prep without feeling like everything’s collapsing. Sometimes I deliberately leave a few dishes in the sink overnight, just to practice tolerating small amounts of disorder without my nervous system sounding every alarm.
The real healing hasn’t come from choosing order over chaos or learning to love the calm. It’s come from recognizing that my hypervigilance was a brilliant adaptation to an impossible situation. That little girl who learned to read the emotional weather? She kept us safe. She got us through. The adult work is thanking her for her service while gently letting her know that her shifts can be shorter now.
Living in the middle
These days, I think of myself as bilingual in order and chaos. I can speak both languages, navigate both worlds. When life gets genuinely chaotic (as it does, because that’s life), I have skills that people who grew up in stability sometimes lack. I can stay calm in a crisis, think clearly when everything’s falling apart, and help others find their footing when the ground shifts.
But I can also, finally, after years of practice, sit in a quiet room without feeling like I’m waiting for something to explode. I can have a routine without clinging to it like a life raft. I can be in a healthy relationship with someone whose emotional weather is predictably mild, though it took me three years to stop trying to create storms just to feel normal.
The mark that chaos leaves isn’t a wound that needs healing so much as it’s a complex adaptation that needs integration. We don’t need to be fixed. We need to expand our range, to learn that we can survive safety too, that order and chaos aren’t enemies but dance partners, and that sometimes the bravest thing we can do is simply let things be okay.
