reframing discomfort

I wouldn’t call it an identity crisis, I don’t feel qualified to define what an identity crisis is.

The concept of a quarter life crisis feels like the punch line of a semi sarcastic joke, the milder version of the mid-life crises we watch played out on TV.

Though when I consider I am close enough to twenty five, maybe this isn’t so far fetched.

Maybe to avoid diagnostic labels we can call it as it is — discomfort.

Living in a new city, being surrounded by new people, working at a job with a new schedule, and finding myself in the space created from the 9-5 mentality of leaving work at work and having evenings and weekends all to yourself… I was ashamed to admit feeling nostalgia for the comfortable and familiar structures that stitched my life together for most of my conscious existence. School.

As I sit here writing this, it’s a Sunday afternoon, a gloomy January one at that and I find comfort tucking myself away in the corner of the library.

Without schoolwork, I’m consciously and unconsciously creating reasons to open up my laptop, longing to feel like I am working towards something, creating momentum, planting seeds that will bud into a sense of accomplishment.

If you’re someone who was or is itching to graduate and never look back— I can understand your skepticism here. Though I’d argue you can fill in any blank for school as it applies to you.

Maybe you grew up playing organized sports for as long as you could remember, or went to summer camp for decades, or have spent your past hundred weekends going out with your best friends who lived down the street and now you can’t anymore because you work impossible hours on Wall Street. Whatever your prerogative is, the fracturing we experience from loosing something we hadn’t necessarily considered a part of our identity until it is taken from us can be discouraging and confusing and rather… uncomfortable.

Like the fish who doesn’t acknowledge the water surrounding him until he finds himself on dry land struggling to breathe, sometimes we don’t realize something was a part of who we are until it isn’t.

I wouldn’t even consider myself someone who loved school, but I felt very comfortable in the structure and flow of it. Despite feeling overworked and overwhelmed through much of my academic career, I chased satisfaction and validation by working myself into the ground for finals and building myself back up again over holiday and summer breaks.

Regardless of your thoughts or feelings towards school, in the standard American school system we aren’t taught how to have hobbies or pursue our interests or even make friends outside the school structures that become so ingrained in us.

We aren’t taught how to shape our own lives around an existence that is fun and fulfilling and unique to us.

It’s no wonder that when the training wheels come off the bike some of us feel like we were never taught how to ride.

Ample free time to explore what interests us, meet new people, and restructure our lives from scratch can feel more overwhelming and scary than liberating and abundant.

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If I was granted unlimited resources to put towards my next steps, entering the workforce after graduation would not have been my first choice.

Part of me was intrigued and excited by what the absence of school would feel like, but the other part of me would have happily jumped into a post-graduate degree and worn the ‘forever student’ archetype as a badge of honor.

This is all to say that in the months since graduating I have found myself feeling very uncomfortable sitting in the emptiness of all this ‘new’.

In the not knowing what I like to do in my free time, in the not always having a friend to make a plan with, in the not affording to have a workout scheduled daily or the not having a laundry list of items to check off my to list.

In the grand scheme of life these ‘problems’ feel minuscule and invalid. Yet the discomfort is still uncomfortable, in whatever form it takes.

I’ve begun to ask myself: What is discomfort isn’t failure?

What if I view this discomfort as an invitation to witness how fleeting our feelings and perceptions are?

What if this discomfort is a friendly reminder that I have stepped outside my comfort zone in someway, and that newness and emptiness are only visitors?

Just because it feels uncomfortable doesn’t mean its wrong.

Just as familiar is not synonymous with good, unfamiliar does not mean bad.

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If discomfort comes in all shapes in sizes, coping does too.

Initially I coped by trying to pack my days and weeks full with MORE. I resisted sitting still at all costs, I wanted to make plans and start new projects and find ways to make extra cash. I wanted to fit in daily workouts and find more friends to spend time with.

There is nothing wrong with any of these pursuits, it is the energy we plug into them. In my case the energy was frantic. I was doing to suppress the voice screaming at me to just sit still for a damn minute.

The discomfort of doing and the discomfort of being in the non-doing are actually not opposites but acquaintances. I think this is a hard balance to articulate and to navigate for oneself because it ebbs and flows often.

Different seasons of life require different ratios of doing and non-doing, different degrees of intentionally sitting in or walking with whatever your discomfort looks and feels like.

The opposite is the medicine. I wish I could credit the original source of this idea but I don’t remember where I heard it. I think about it often.

If the discomfort of non-doing makes me want to fill my time with empty items on a full to-do list, what is the medicine?

Sitting still. Letting there be space without filling it, letting life come to me.

Maybe for you the discomfort is putting yourself in motion.

It could look like trying that new hobby or attending that meet-up on a week night, or going on dates, or building an exercise routine that feels good for you without worrying about what everyone else is doing.

The medicine is getting up and taking one baby step towards what feels exciting to you, towards building a life of your unique fulfillment and joy because the smallest movement in that direction is 1000% more progress than no movement at all.

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Whichever I am craving but resisting, whether it is the discomfort of stillness or of action, I try to return to these reframes when I am feeling overwhelmed and existential:

What if this I could view discomfort as an invitation?

What if the open-endedness of this new could be fun?

How can I make the process of learning and rebuilding an adventure rather than a task I get right or wrong?

How can I ground myself into existing in this space of in between while I am shedding some of the what has been and stepping into the what is to come?

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This isn’t a one time thing but a daily practice. Whatever your form of discomfort takes, the shift that comes with reframing our relationship to being uncomfortable can be relieving and liberating.

It’s not fun or glamorous but the biggest shifts come from going into what we’re resisting instead of avoiding it.

When we go in and shift our inner landscape the external world reflects it right back to us.