You Are Allowed to Be a Contradiction.
On sitting with the parts of yourself that do not add up.
By Lauren Weathers, PhD
Song on repeat while writing: Messy — Olivia Dean
This week, I went to a talk for Cairo Claire Burke's debut novel Yesteryear. The room was filled with people, mostly women, who spanned generations. There were fans of her social media commentary, fans of Diabolical Lies, the podcast she co-creates with Katie Gatti Tassin. The room was also filled with perfectionists. The novel had just been released and I could tell we all did not want spoilers and quietly felt behind on the assignment because we had not finished the book yet. But maybe that was just my anxiety. I went in tired from work and fearing I would be up past my bedtime. Instead the event helped me feel in community. My heart felt full. I felt hope, excitement, and a sense of safety I did not know I was looking for that night.
The novel hits on so many topics that feel urgent right now: trad wives, complicated female characters, women who want one thing and realize that is not what they want. I am still reading Yesteryear, so fact-check me on this, but so far these feel like the major themes.
The most impactful part of the night for me was the audience Q&A. I do not remember the exact question, but the gist was this: How do I sit with my contradictions? How do I hold wanting to live in a high cost of living city, work in corporate, and also hate the capitalist machine I am participating in? How do I exist inside the very systems I want to dismantle?
That person was clearly asking for themselves. They wanted absolution. And that is what hit so hard: they were not asking an abstract philosophical question. They were asking how to stop wrestling with the parts of their identity that do not add up. And I recognized it immediately, as a human and as a psychologist.
I do not remember Caro's exact response, but the core of what she said has been sitting with me since. Something like: it is a waste of time to wrestle with the morality of being human, of wanting contradictory things, of existing imperfectly inside the world as it actually is. Things do not have to be labeled good or bad. You can sit with the discomfort of your own contradictions without resolving them. Inner peace is accepting and sitting with the discomfort, not creating morality or spiraling with anxiety about perfectly fixing these contradictions.
This answer resonated with me personally and given the work I do.. I keep coming back to this Q&A and wanted to write about it so those who were not there could process this part of the night and have it examined through a specialized anxiety lens.
Many of my clients are working on this exact thing. They want to be good. They analyze their own behavior constantly, trying to ensure they are living their values exactly the "right way." They are afraid of being unreliable narrators of their own lives. They worry someone will call them out if they cannot live in perfect alignment with every value all the time, or if they have to choose one value over another.
I have clients who want to age gracefully and also want to get Botox. Clients who want to build their retirement account and also book the trip. Clients who want deep relationships with their family and also want to completely restructure those relationships to survive them. Clients who want to create political change and also keep buying from some, but not all, brands that are part of the problem.
And clients who want their life to look like the opening scene of The Devil Wears Prada: that montage of women across New York City getting dressed, moving with intention through their apartments and out into the world, KT Tunstall's Suddenly I See building underneath all of it. And also do not want the pressure of having their underwear always match their bras. I will say, I am always proud of when a workout set matches (I mostly buy black to increase those odds) or when my bras and underwear match. But I cannot handle the mental load of existing in this timeline and also doing that perfectly.
That song. Every time I hear it I am transported straight back to that film. And I have to be honest: I always wanted to be the fashion women in that opening, not Andy, the main character we are meant to root for. I realize now I want to be both. And both can co-exist. I have not seen the second Devil Wears Prada yet, but I hope Andy gets there too.
You cannot act in perfect alignment with every value all the time. Values conflict. That is not a character flaw. That is just being alive.
I moved to New York City last September. On paper it made no financial sense. I have financial goals and this move went against most of them. I moved at an age when I was supposed to be settling down. I started over instead.
And yet. I have access to art, cultural events, third spaces, and the kind of daily diversity that fills me up in a way I had not felt in years. I feel alive here. I feel like the version of myself I had been moving toward.
I had to make peace with the fact that I chose one set of values over another, because the value of moving to New York mattered more. Not because the financial ones do not matter, but because in that moment, this one did. Maybe I will get priced out of living here one day. If that happens, I will pivot. For now, I wanted this. And I chose it. And I am grinding to afford it.
That is not a contradiction I want to resolve. It is a contradiction I want to hold without fixing.
In ACT, the therapeutic approach I use alongside ERP, values clarification is not about finding the one true thing you stand for and never wavering from it. Values, for the purposes of this post, are the things that genuinely matter to you: how you want to spend your time, who you want to be, what kind of life feels like yours. They are not rules. They are directions.
Values clarification is about getting honest with yourself about what actually matters so you can make conscious choices based on your values and not your anxious thoughts.
The anxious version of a contradiction sounds like: "I should not want both of these things. Something is wrong with me for wanting both. I cannot act until I figure this out."
The values version sounds like: these two things are both real and both mine. Right now, in this moment, which one do I want to prioritize? And can I make that choice without needing it to mean something permanent about who I am? And is it okay if that choice goes against one value in service of another?
You are allowed to change your mind. You are allowed to want things that do not fit neatly together. You are allowed to be a work in progress and still make decisions anyway. You are allowed to exist as a complex human filled with different wants and needs that do not always perfectly align.
What I want for every woman in that room, and every client I work with, and honestly myself, is to be less afraid of being good or bad. To accept that we are all contradictions. That values conflicts are not failures. That sitting with discomfort without being derailed by it is not just a therapy skill. It is a way of living.
Caro created a container that night for the person asking the question, and for everyone in that room who recognized themselves in it, to exist without being perfect. To want things that do not always go together. To be a contradiction and keep going anyway.
That is the work. And it is also just life. It is the same container I try to create in the therapy space for clients to learn to sit with and accept these contradictions.
To be a contradiction and keep living, multifaceted.
If this resonated, this is the kind of work I do with clients: not just treating anxiety symptoms, but untangling the stories underneath them. If you are ready to figure out what is actually yours, I would love to work with you.
