God Bless This Mess: Learning to Live and Love Through Life's Best (and Worst) Moments
Hannah Brown
Introduction
I’m a total train wreck.”
That’s a pretty big thing to admit, let alone to say to another person. Let alone to say to a stranger. And when I said it back in early 2018, I wasn’t talking to myself in the mirror at the end of a really hard day. I didn’t write it in my journal. I didn’t say it to my therapist or a close girlfriend. I wasn’t even talking to my mom.
I said it to a camera crew—in front of millions of viewers on TV.
Then I took things one step further: “The hot-mess express,” I said, when they asked me to sum up my life. “And I’m the conductor! Toot-toot!”
Can you imagine? This was my chance to introduce myself to the potential man of my dreams (not to mention a worldwide television audience) when I went on a little show called The Bachelor, and those were the words I chose to describe myself.
I’ll tell you what, though: I wasn’t lying. I think a lot of people who’ve watched me on TV or followed me on Instagram would say I have lived up to that description to a T.
And I’m okay with that.
I am a hot mess.
I don’t mean it in a negative way. It’s just the truth. I’m twenty-six years old as I’m writing this book. I’m smack in the middle of trying to figure out who I am as a person. Lots of girls go through big changes and tough relationships and crazy challenges as they transition from teens and young women into full-blown adults. I’m not alone, right? (Please, God, tell me I’m not alone!)
At times I feel like I’m going through some sort of quarter-life crisis. Is that even a thing? If not, then I think we should make it a thing, because lots of people I know seem to be going through something similar.
The only difference is, I’ve been doing it while millions of people are watching.
While this is not a Bachelor or Bachelorette book, my time on those shows, followed by my winning season on Dancing with the Stars, just happened to come when I was going through some of the biggest changes and most challenging struggles of my life. I was watched, loved, hated, admired, scolded, and scorned, all at once, in public, while all kinds of commentators kept talking about my struggles with faith and sex and feminism in front of the whole world, in women’s magazines, on competing TV networks, and even on NPR. And that led me to develop an audience of millions of fans of my own on social media; followers who tell me all the time that they’re just so happy to see someone be real on TV; happy to see someone who wears her heart on her sleeve; someone who reminds them a little bit of themselves and what their lives would be like if the cameras captured their reality on TV, messes and all. Mostly, they tell me how refreshing it is to see someone who’s so open, which has made me feel empowered to open up even more.
But guess what? My most private thoughts, my private moments, the emotional history that led me to become the mess I became, have all been kept safe in my heart and in my journals. I’ve never shared the stuff that I hope is most relatable to you, the person who’s holding this book. Until now.
There were nights when my smiling face was out there drawing big ratings for these popular TV shows when in real life I was sitting alone in an empty apartment, eating takeout food with a plastic fork, crying my eyes out, wiping snot from my face, and questioning why God was testing me like this. Why was I feeling so inadequate, not trusting my gut, chasing false trophies, allowing myself to be betrayed by men who said they loved me, not recognizing the difference between real love and something less? Why was I so afraid to express my true thoughts and feelings, not only with men but in so many aspects of my life?
Maybe it’s because sometimes I didn’t even know or understand what my own true thoughts and feelings were.
My life really was a complete mess, and God bless all of it. Because it’s in the messes where we learn the most—as long as we slow down enough to realize what God is trying to show us.
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For most of my life the idea of slowing down had been a problem for me, but by early 2020 it was full-on out of control. It felt like my “hot-mess express” was going two hundred miles per hour when the pandemic stood up and pulled on the emergency brake. And then, just like everybody else, I found myself facing the world at a standstill.
All of a sudden I had time on my hands. For the first time since I can’t even remember, I stopped moving from one thing to the next and the next and the next. And whether I wanted to or not, whether I was ready for it or not, whether I liked it or not, the quarantine (and a couple of mistakes I made during that time) forced me to take a good long look in the mirror.
That’s a good thing. I mean, it should be, right? How often do we get a chance to stop and really think about what we’re doing, who we are, and who we want to be? With 100 percent of my new career opportunities in Hollywood on hold for a moment, I finally got a chance to ask myself why I was going so fast in the first place—and why that felt so important.
The thing is, when you live so much life so quickly, you change. That’s not a bad thing, but I realized that whenever someone asked me to explain my experience over the past few years, or even over the past several months, I actually had a visceral reaction. I would take a big gulp, heave an even bigger sigh, and immediately feel my throat close up to prevent the words from coming out. It’s like every thought would leave my mind, and I wanted to flee the conversation. I was paralyzed by the wave of emotions that rushed over my body in a matter of seconds.