What the Fran

Eviction from the comfort zone

If I want to try new things and do more stuff... I need to leave my cave. Both metaphorical and literal. I'm a cave-dwelling goblin, an old-fashioned hermit except I like pizza and samosa chaats too much. My ideal form would be a benign shambling mound lurking in the hedgerow, covered in mud. Most days there's not much difference in it to be fair.

Which is to say, I am very much an introvert. Anytime I do something I need to go lay down for twice as long to recover. Except. The thing is. It's good for me to do things and get out of my comfort zone.

Two takes on comfort zones: First, perhaps the comfier I make my comfort zone maybe the less I want to leave. On the other hand, the easier it is to leave because I know I can come back and be safe.

So I started this volunteering and knew next to nothing about it going in. It said there would be training, which turned out just to be your very standard health and safety type stuff. It's also not really what it was advertised as.

For the first few weeks I was just thinking, What am I even doing here? But the thing is: I knew I would feel that way. Because I was out of my comfort zone, miles from my cave. I knew I'd start feeling there was no point and it was badly organised and so on and so forth. To allow myself to quit righteously. But knowing this instinct I also knew I just needed to ignore that part of myself. Because every other time these things have worked out and if I want to quit I can but not in the first few months. It's not reflective of the place or of my true feelings.

I'm a big believer in the mere-exposure effect. Familiarity is more likely to build affection than contempt. If I just keep exposing myself to a person, place, situation, I will most probably come to like them. Also, in the inverse, I know this is true of me. I'm an awkward oddbod and at first glance people are put off by me. They also need to be exposed to me. Then we all get comfortable and something clicks. It felt a bit like something started clicking last week.

More things I can do that are new and creative and out of my comfort zone:

Note my massive enthusiasm at the end there. Because I'm generally not. But I can get that way! And every time I do crawl out of my comfort zone it makes the next time easier.

Tomorrow: what I want to learn next.