What Gives You Direction in Life?

Chaos gives me direction.

I know—that probably sounds discomforting to most people. Even those who say they embrace the chaos still try to control it. But that’s the thing: you don’t control chaos. Chaos just is. You control how you respond to it. That response is not a reaction—it’s coherence.

People think chaos means disorder. It doesn’t. That’s mayhem. Chaos is dynamic. Alive. Mayhem is what happens when we try to force chaos into predictable shapes and it breaks against us. Chaos is where life begins. Every origin story—scientific, philosophical, spiritual, mythological—starts in chaos.

And I’ve always thrived in it.

Where others lose clarity, I find it. Chaos has rhythm if you’re willing to feel it instead of fix it. I didn’t understand this fully until I tried to control the chaos in my life. That’s when I fractured. I lost myself. I forgot myself. And in the process, I traumatized myself.

See, I used to be at peace with contradiction and paradox. I could hold them in both hands without erasure. Then about six years ago, I tried to fit into something cleaner. More “normal.” I bought into the version of authenticity that gets sold to us—often with nice typography and a subscription box.

I paid for that version of “authentic living.” With money, yes, but also with parts of myself. The revival of authenticity that took over between 2012 and 2017? It wasn’t new. Authenticity gets revived every few decades, and every time it does, it gets sanitized and sold back to us in curated little packages.

We’re told to be real—but post it.
We’re told to be vulnerable—but keep it monetizable.
We’re told to be whole—but not disruptive.

Authenticity became a marketing strategy. A performance metric.

It’s no wonder people feel fractured. No wonder we confuse healing with hustle. No wonder we’re tired.

The truth? Authenticity is dead.

At least, the mass-produced kind. The kind that gets pathologized, repackaged, and sold back to us as a self-improvement plan. A journey that somehow always keeps the destination just out of reach—unless you upgrade your membership.

When I saw that for what it was, I realized I needed a different name. A new language. Because I couldn’t be myself inside their version of authenticity. It demanded a mask I didn’t make and couldn’t wear.

So I stopped trying.

I gave it a new name: Oddthentic.

Because I’m wonderfully weird.
Responsibly spontaneous.
Chaotically clean.
Energetically calm.

I stopped performing coherence and started embodying it. And my life? It began to shift.

Not in ways most people would notice. But internally—my mind returned to its natural state. A playground. My emotions started regulating themselves—not through checklists or diagnostics, but through actual presence.

My CPTSD? Gone.
Anxiety and panic? Gone.
ADHD? Integrated. Embraced.

I had been a ghost haunting his own life. Triggers shaped like joy, silence, productivity, and “peace.” But now—now, I’m here. I’m whole. Not polished. Not perfect. Just coherent.

My direction doesn’t come from order. It comes from embracing the pulse of chaos, without trying to shrink it. It comes from naming my truth in my own language.

It comes from being Oddthentic as hell.

TL;DR: Direction comes from chaos. Integration comes from coherence. Healing comes from owning your weird. And I’m not going back.