Comfort Zones
One of the hardest things to do in your youthful years is stepping out of your comfort zone. Especially when you are in these gap years, in college, where you have adapted to a pretty foundational version of yourself, but yet to be fully developed into your entire self.
So, it becomes easy to stay inside of your comfort zone, because the way that you carried yourself throughout high school and your younger years is simply what you are comfortable with. Regardless of whether or not you were happy with yourself when you stayed within those comfort zones, you still resort to them because they’ve shaped who you are today.
Although, one of the toughest things I’ve learned is that who you are today isn’t necessarily who you’re supposed to be tomorrow. Throughout the past month, after some events that have made me do some looking in the mirror, I’ve tried to leave that comfort zone that I’ve been living in, and would argue I was trapped within.
My comfort zone has always been keeping to myself. I put my walls up and decide that it’s best for me to just spend my time alone, doing the things that I’ve done my entire life. Without a doubt, it’s great to have some alone time and find some independence, but it’s simply impossible to grow when I’m stuck within those restrictions.
Because of all of that time that I’ve spent alone, it was hard for me to open up to people, because I refused to believe that my life was interesting enough for people to find any interest in it. So, I became a guarded and invulnerable person that refused to share any details about my life and who I am, despite having a lot of unique perspectives and experiences that aren’t uninteresting.
It took some time away from campus on spring break, but I realized that it was time to stop putting those walls up, and it was time to live a bit more freely and broaden my horizons. It could be joining organizations, going to social gatherings, or just stepping away from my normal spaces, but there are way too many opportunities here at the University of Texas at Austin for me to just spend my time with my walls up and away from any opportunity to expand my identity.
Exploring these opportunities has helped me open up sides of me to people that I hadn’t even thought of before. It brings me back to a quote that Austin Butler expressed recently, stating that “Embarrassment is an under-explored emotion. Go out there and make a fool of yourself.”
This quote and my experiences of stepping away from my comfort zone has made me realize how much fear I was living in. Fear of judgement, fear of being left out, fear of being disapproved. These explorations, though, made me realize more than anything that all of those fears were already true by me not stepping out of my comfort zone. So, why not at least try?
