Comfort Zones are Confusing Places

Why do I keep stepping wildly outside of mine? I’m not sure, actually

Image by the author.

It’s a wonder I now write for a living.

In kindergarten, we had these brightly colored journals with red plastic binding. Each day, we’d draw a picture on the first half of the page and write something about that picture on the lines underneath.

At the time, I had several irrational fears that seemed perfectly rational and paralyzing to my six-year-old self. One of those was the fear of spelling a word incorrectly in my journal and accidentally writing something very, very bad and offensive to my beloved teachers.

They’d gently correct me again and again, but I wasn’t buying it. It simply didn’t seem possible that “there” wasn’t spelled “der” (as in “I went over der”). My creativity never extended to the visual realm, so half my drawings were of “desins” (you’re saying the “g” is silent, but I simply don’t believe you, teacher). This continued all year and never once did someone get impatient with me. I don’t remember when I finally worked up the courage to use their preferred spellings and see what happened.

I may have been unusually tall for my age, with big, bold purple, pink and green glasses you could see from a mile away (hey, it was the ‘90s), but my comfort zone…