The only way out is through
- Robert Frost
For a long time I would use as my personal motto the phrase: I don’t do easy. It was a crude and not quite accurate wording of a concept that I knew I was committed to but didn’t quite have the language to name clearly. A couple of years ago I heard a phrase from Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams that perfectly encapsulated this commitment I had been living: building my tolerance for discomfort.
It was never that I wanted things to be hard, rather it was that I understood that the only path to the kind of growth I was looking for, to being on the road towards the person I wanted to continue becoming, was to continue making choices that pushed me out of my place of comfort, that asked me to challenge the assumptions and habit patterns that I had been conditioned in, and to - in making those choices - widen the space inside myself that I could occupy.
One of the things that I carry, a habit pattern that I developed very early on, is a tremendous amount of shyness. People who know me or have seen me in one of my communities have trouble believing this because when I am comfortable in a space or with people this shyness disappears completely. But when I am in a new situation, when I am around people I do not know, my shyness can send me straight into a freeze response. It is a shyness that is rooted in a fear of judgement and manifests in a feeling, an assumption really, that I will not be accepted, that I will be ridiculed.
What is most frustrating about this shyness is that the person I know myself to be, the version of myself that I understand as true and core, actually loves meeting new people. I love making new connections, I love hearing another person’s story, I love learning the ways we are each different, and seeing the ways we are all the same. So this shyness that I carry shows up as a real challenge for me. It is a built in obstacle towards getting to experience the thing that I am most drawn towards.
I have, throughout the course of my life, discovered that there are three strategies I employ to move through this shyness. The first is avoidance: to not go to new places, to only meet people in situations where people I already know are making an introduction. This strategy, while keeping me in comfort, is completely unsatisfying to the part of me that actually enjoys new connections.
My second strategy is finding work-arounds: this mostly looks like putting myself in situations where I have a specific role to play, a script to go by, an external reason or structure that gives me permission to engage with people without confronting my shyness. The problem with this strategy is that it locks me into a role, it doesn’t make space for me to show up with all of myself, and doesn't allow me to see what version of myself wants to emerge in a given situation.
The third strategy is the only one that ends up being satisfying: sitting with the discomfort, sitting with all of the feelings and doing the hard thing anyway, staying in the messy space of holding at the same time the truth that meeting new people absolutely terrifies me, and the truth that I love meeting new people. It is a practice of holding both, of giving myself space to feel all of the discomfort, while also pushing myself to do the hard thing.
To me this is what building my tolerance for discomfort means: that I face the hard things, that I sit with the uncomfortable feelings that arise in my body, and that I breathe into those sensations to remind myself that - though the discomfort in my body is real, I can handle it, and by handling it, by sitting with it, by breathing through it, by facing the hard thing, I am doing the work of living out my values, I am doing the work of becoming the person I know at my core I want to be.