Getting Comfortable...

I hate the term “comfort zone.” I’m always hearing people tell me that I need to leave my “comfort zone.”

When I took writing courses in college, class was instructed to “take a chance” and “leave your comfort zone” with our writing. By and large, my instructors were referring to the standards and laws of grammar. This is, of course, preposterous. Grammar is so arbitrary that I doubt anyone has ever considered following grammatical laws to be comfortable anyway. So… to write successfully we should leave our grammatical “comfort zones” by going back to our own logical conclusions as to how an idea should be conveyed? Capital!

I worked in sales for a brief time. Insurance sales, of all things. My “comfort zone” was about as far away from insurance sales as Tibet is from freedom (but we’ll have to save the insurance rant for another time). This is true of most people I worked with. Sometimes, you just need a job to pay the bills. Sometimes you have to stoop pretty low to find that job. But I digress… whenever I was told to leave my “comfort zone” in that job, it was usually followed up with a lecture about pushing a particular product that I believed to be little better than a turd. Okay, occasionally the product was a turd wrapped in aluminum foil, but it was a turd nonetheless. Here, I suppose the “comfort zone” is comprised less of rational thought and more of ethics.

First a “comfort zone” is rational thought… next a “comfort zone” is ethics… this is exactly why I hate the term. “Comfort zones” are everywhere. There are dozens, if not hundreds of them floating around our lives. To paraphrase Churchill, “to have too much of something is to have nothing.” I’m pretty sure Churchill said that…or something like that…or someone else said it…the point is that the term “comfort zone” has become as meaningless as “support our troops” (come on… hanging a yellow ribbon outside your house or thanking an soldier stationed in the States is not supporting our troops – volunteer some time at the local VA or send a care package, for goodness sake!).

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that “comfort zones” don’t really exist. Write that nonfiction account of that time you shot some bad heroin that you climbed a tree disappeared for three hours, came back, and another blazed friend of yours tried to knife you to death because he was concerned that you were a zombie. After all, the cops can’t do anything about it now – the drugs are way out of your system.

Recall that childhood moment in which you pilfered a chocolate from the local thrift store, or broke your mother’s favorite vase with a football, or pushed the dorky kid in the mud (sorry about that, Tommy – I was only slightly less dorky than you and had to score some of that sweet playground rep with the cool kids). After all, they aren’t embarrassing memories to be ashamed of…that probably taught you some valuable lessons that you integrated into your being, like; swiping a candy may be tasty of a moment, but that bar of soap used to ‘cleanse’ the taste from your mouth negated any gain and taught you to be wary of ill-gotten gains; that football in the house is only awesome until you’re busted and that real pigskin NFL football you saved three weeks allowance for probably would have had a longer existence had you developed the patience to wait 30 more seconds until you were outside the house; or that, sometimes, the way to get someone else’s attention is to hurt the little guy (sorry again, Tommy).

Share that story about the time in college you felt the urge to experiment and engaged in a homosexual relationship for a semester. Guess what… all that high school and college drama bullshit melts away after graduation – the only people who will shun you for it are the ones with the extremely close-minded worldviews, and you don’t need them anyway. I have a buddy who shared a similar story, and the generally supportive response he received gave him the confidence to admit that he was bisexual, and now he’s getting more action that most of us put together! He’s got an extra life experience that the rest of us don’t, and it’s hard not to be a little jealous (buying drinks for girls can get expensive… must be nice for someone else to be doing the buying once in a while). Of course, I have a female friend who has a similar story and the experience didn’t do much for her except leave a few horn dogs at the table a nice mental image for late, but that’s not the point.

I wonder, though, did they really ‘step out’ of the “comfort zone?” Or did they just expand it? And if all they did was expand it, could they really step out of it in the first place? Does it even exist at that point? Really, they’ve both stumbled onto a whole new stage… one where the potential for negative peer or societal judgment becomes irrelevant compared to the self-expansion.

All the world may be a stage… but why be players when we can write our own show? If it is truly paramount to thine own self be true, then don’t we owe it to ourselves as writers to not hide our pasts? How can people be interested in what we share if we hold back and aren’t willing to share everything? Don’t get me wrong – you shouldn’t share everything. Way too much is too boring and pointless to ever be repeated. Probably. But you should be willing to.

And for the record – I only have one comfort zone: that part of the day that comes before I have to put on pants and start being productive.