Comfort assists subtle avoidance, stifling growth beyond the comfort zone's glass.

The kind of discomfort that shows up around being seen might be a directional cue.

Discomfort can nudge growth beyond familiar, fixed versions of ourselves.

Kurt Vonnegut once said, “Stay in New York too long, you get too hard. Stay in Los Angeles too long, you get too soft.” I live in Los Angeles, which means I have, over time, developed a highly refined relationship to comfort.

If you asked me what matters most to me, I would not say comfort. I would say growth, or truth, or connection. Something with a little more spine. And yet, if you tracked my behavior over the course of a week, you might reasonably conclude that my guiding principle is: avoid unnecessary discomfort at all costs.

Lately, I’ve been trying to interrupt that.

The Problem With Comfort

Comfort is persuasive. It doesn’t present itself as avoidance. It presents itself as discernment. “This isn’t the right moment.” “I should wait until I’m better at this.” “There’s no need to rush.”

Meanwhile, the things that actually matter tend to sit just outside the comfort zone, tapping politely at the glass. The email you don’t send. The idea you don’t voice. The project you don’t begin because it would require you to be visible before you feel completely ready.

Comfort keeps me safe. It also keeps me in place.

I have begun to suspect that I have been using comfort less as a support and more as a strategy.

An Airbnb Experience and the Audacity of It

Recently, I started hosting an Airbnb experience out of my home with my husband, Jim. In it, we talk about what makes a great beginning in stories. Stories of all kinds: novels, memoirs, films, television. Openings. First lines. First images. The moment a story declares itself.

It is, when I say it out loud, wildly ambitious.

Who am I to teach what makes a great beginning across all these forms? I have worked in television. I have written books. I have opinions. But there is a particular flavor of discomfort that comes from positioning yourself, even modestly, as someone who might have something to say about craft at that level.

I imagine people thinking, “What makes her an expert on stories of all kinds?

I imagine them being right.

There is a kind of arrogance in it. Or at least the appearance of arrogance. Standing in your own home, essentially saying, come here and I will tell you what works.

I have also started recording my poems and putting them on Instagram. This, too, feels like a small act of social overreach.

There is something deeply exposing about reading your own work aloud and offering it up without context, without buffer. Just your voice, your words, and the quiet hope that someone might receive them.

Apparently, I am someone who is practicing not answering that question before acting.

Social media in general has this effect on me. It asks for a version of the self that is both curated and immediate. It invites visibility and then punishes it with indifference or, worse, scrutiny. My instinct is to hover at the edges, to participate just enough to feel involved but not enough to feel vulnerable.

And yet, the whole point, if there is one, seems to be the vulnerability.

The Discomfort of Reaching Out

I co-host a podcast called Fifty Words for Snow, where we explore words that don’t have direct English equivalents. For a long time, when it came to booking guests, I stayed within the circle of people I knew. It was efficient. It was comfortable. It worked.

Recently, I’ve started reaching out to people I admire. Writers, thinkers, people whose work I genuinely love and who have no particular reason to respond to me. This is not comfortable.

It feels like asking for something without leverage. It feels like risking being ignored in a way that is hard to reinterpret. It feels like standing just slightly too far outside the circle and announcing yourself anyway.

But it also feels like movement. Like the possibility of something new entering.

The Edge as Instruction

I am starting to think that discomfort, the particular kind that shows up around being seen, might be less of a warning sign and more of a directional cue.

Not all discomfort is useful. Some of it is simply misalignment. But some of it carries information. It points toward the places where we are stretching beyond the version of ourselves that feels fixed and known.

Hosting an Airbnb experience about story beginnings. Recording poems. Reaching out to strangers I admire. None of these feel natural to me. All of them feel, in different ways, slightly mortifying.

And yet, they also feel alive.

I am not trying to become a person who is comfortable all the time. I am trying to become a person who can recognize when comfort is quietly narrowing the field.

So when I feel that familiar resistance, that tightening that says, "Don’t do this, you might look ridiculous," I am experimenting with staying.

Just long enough to begin.

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