Being Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable
Trying to be comfortable with being uncomfortable has been a common theme in my life and recently I’ve really been trying to master it.
We all have those guilty pleasures that we lean on when we’re stressed, tired, or just don’t want to deal, like sanctuaries or vices that we run to when we want to set aside our discomforts with life. I was 17 years old when I left home; growing up with a strict upbringing leaving felt like I had finally found the exit to the box I was stuck inside.
After I had experimented with life and discovered more of my strengths and weaknesses I realized certain habits and crutches that started to make me feel like I was locking myself IN a box instead of escaping it. This was when I personally became aware of the cages and crutches we create for ourselves. Everyone has their own personal escapes, don’t kid yourself into believing drugs are all there is.
Back then, the box I was trying to escape was my childhood woes, people's perspectives of me that I allowed to define me, anger, rejection, neglect, blah blah blah; but NOW, I realize when I get the urge to escape, it’s DISCOMFORT in general that I’m wanting to escape. Being human we all have more specific reasons, experiences, emotions, or people that we constantly get the urge to escape from. And as many discomforts there are in life there’s ten times the amount of escapes to whisk away the discomforts we yearn to flee from. Whenever I beat one bad habit there’s a thousand more trying to tetras their way into the spot, i.e food, coffee, boys, music, punching people’s faces..
But to get more to my point about this ramble, being uncomfortable is so important for growth, for change and bettering oneself. It’s when we get comfortable that we get depressed and too dependent on things that we as humans don’t really need.
If you compare conditioning your mind to conditioning your body, we can think about it logically. When exercising it’s only when we push ourselves past our breaking points that we actually start to reshape our bodies. We must do more pushups than we could yesterday to be able to do more push ups today, that’s how we build more muscle. To be able to run farther, you have to push your body past the mile marker that you know you haven’t been able to get past yet.
The same is true with exercising your emotions as well as your mental capacity. To be more comfortable talking to people, you must talk to more people. To practice being more loving/less judgmental you need to be put in situations where you can practice being more loving/less judgmental, i.e being around people who are different from you, putting yourself in situations that challenge you, allowing yourself to be uncomfortable. By giving ourselves easy escapes we’re only stunting our own growth, we’re very much doing ourselves a disservice by taking away our opportunities for growth.
To grow as communities and the human species in general we must stop stealing experiences from ourselves by setting up easy outs. Being uncomfortable is the prime condition for growth as a human being. Conditioning our minds, bodies, and hearts to being comfortable with being uncomfortable is what the entire human experience is about! I know this to be true with my entire being, and it’s proven to me by seeing how the true nature of all things is revealed when things are raw without masks or walls. By unveiling the truth, and being able to evaluate the actual state of things, we as intelligent systems are able to evaluate, analyze, and problem solve. This is the perfect recipe for growth and that’s what we humans do, we grow and grow and grow some more.
