The Quintessential Messy Friend

The messy friend is so often depicted as a disco ball with cracked pieces, or an unhinged beauty drinking too many cosmos. Think— a star that will eventually burn you.

This edition of Thought Spirals was inspired by the movie Good Grief, and a series of other shows and movies as well as my 5th rewatch of Insecure.

Good Grief is a film about the death of an Artist— Marc whose husband dies suddenly. Marc deals with complex grief; his husband left behind a note saying that he’s fallen in love with someone else. An adventure in Paris occurs in the apartment that Marc’s dead husband and his secret lover occupied. He brings along his two best friends, one who is historically in love with him, Thomas, and his quintessential messy, can't-get-it-together friend, Sophie.

Sophie felt like so many characters that we see in media. She’s beautiful and magnetic. But her love life sucks and she’s at fault; struggling with a slew of commitment issues, sore spots, and fears that she can’t seem to acknowledge. She’s the friend that gets too drunk, says the wrong thing, lives in a shitty apartment in her thirties (their words not mine), and refuses to move on from her youth as she continues through her early thirties. But as with every messy friend, there is a breaking point, in her case, she gets so drunk that she puts herself in danger and her friends are left in a state of worry. There’s a sense that her behavior has gone too far, she can no longer be the free-spirited heavy drinker, the friend that they cringe at a little or laugh uneasily as she makes larger and larger mistakes.

With messy friends like Sophie from Good Grief, Jessa from Girls, Sara Yang from Love Life, and the pinnacle of this archetype that is Serena van der Woodson— they become too messy when they make their friends responsible for their well-being. Friends that put themselves in harm’s way under the guise of fun-having, and free-spiritedness. In these cases, there is always something bubbling under the surface. A sense of loss and misdirection can leave the messy friend behaving as if their life is a solitary thing that cannot affect the ones they love. The Quintessential messy friend is often selfish, stubborn, hurt, and stuck in their way. The messy friend is so often depicted as a disco ball with cracked pieces, or an unhinged beauty drinking too many cosmos. Think— a star that will eventually burn you. They are captivating, loved until suddenly not.

I want to turn to Insecure because It moves me every time I watch it. The show is about Issa and Molly—Period. It’s about relationships in general but more intimately about these two friends navigating life together. I think this show belongs in the messy friend conversation because it is an accurate portrayal of the messiness we all possess.

The previously mentioned media examples often feature those who are messy to an extreme and find themselves in an exile to redemption arc. What's funny about Molly and Issa is they are both messy, without the usual trope of being equally captivating and hard to stay away from. Issa opens the season by cheating on her long-term boyfriend with her high school could-have-been, and she doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life. Molly breaks up with a man because he’s bisexual but then pops up at his house days later drunk. Issa tries to keep dating the man she cheats with. It’s textbook messy shit and I love them for it.

They have a slew of issues they’ve gathered from growing up. Fear of failure, commitment, looking stupid, etc. They can't get it right whatever the “it” is. It can be argued that one is messier than the other, but I think they both have their issues and vices that make their lives feel like whirlwinds that we all can relate to.

We are all very messy because life is a messy thing, regardless of how the mess shows itself it exists within each of us and for most of us spills over into a pile that everyone can see and walk around until they have to address it, help us clean it up or simply avoid it and leave. This is the burden of relationships, and as horrible as it is to feel like a burden, it is a unique and unspoken joy to be burdened by the weight of someone’s life— someone who you love and care for. A weight that is welcomed and sometimes difficult to hold, but isn’t it great when the mess is in the background, uncontained, out for both of you to see, and because of that—it’s ok.

Regardless of how you think of it— we all take on the lives of those we love, their hardships, emotions, joys, and messiness. This is what insecure does differently. We are all the quintessential messy friends, too drunk at the party, too many failed relationships and friendships, all of us cycling through periods in which we return to a childlike state— unsure of where to go or what to do. And still, in their mess, Molly and Issa stick together. There are episodes where they are both burned by each other, where they can't hold the truths of themselves or each other in the same way anymore. It's not an exiling though, but space. They come back together within some episodes because part of what seems to make life worthwhile for them is having someone to share the joys and messes with. When Issa experiences a huge event after their friendship breakup she only wants to tell Molly.

There are things we can't handle on our own. Some things we just don’t want to handle alone. I’m not an advocate for cleaning up anyone’s messes. Certain things are too taxing on our relationships. But I don’t think there’s much in life that we should go through alone. So, I hope that at your messiest you allow yourself to be a burden and allow others to do the same.

Maybe we can help each other pick up the mess around here, sometime.