The Comfort Zone

I have a deep psychological vein in my body. I try to understand people, as if they were characters in a movie, it’s my thing. I have seen many movies and I have met a lot of people, so I’m getting better at it. Recently I have tried with a strong effort to understand why I had such a hard time trying to change and why I have witnessed my friends stay the same and endure pain and misery without retaliation. I just figured it out, they’re in their comfort zone.

Imagine yourself in a bunk bed at your friend’s beach house. All your friends are sleeping around in different positions and have different blankets to fight the cold from the A/C. Suppose your cold loving friend set up the A/C at a very low temperature. After a few drinks and partying around you’re all very active and you go to sleep, you don’t feel the cold. After a few hours the temperature sets in, you are now freezing, but you are comfortable.

You lie in your bunk bed covered in a perfect position where your nose is the only part of your body feeling the cold. The rest of your present self is lying static enduring the blizzard. Look around, no one’s moving, yet everyone is freezing in some level. Without thinking, they are all comfortably numb. You see the girl hugging her boyfriend and her boyfriend with a numb arm because she fell asleep on his belly. You see the guy without socks that wrapped a towel around his ankles. Each one of them could choose to get up, turn off the A/C, open the windows and go back to bed in a tropical environment. But they choose not to.

Same thing works in relationships, but we may change the blankets every once in a while. A big part of our history and our personality reflects on how we manage our personal life. I am sort of a story teller, so I have come to think that I need to have a story to tell. Each time I start some kind of relationship I see myself as the main character. I do my best to prove myself against the evil, and sometimes use the point of view of my friends to see how my actions reflect in their minds, although they have nothing to do with it because they are not part of the relation and, I won’t lie to you, I try to find some motivation. That’s me. When I meet a girl I seem to somehow let everyone know that I like her and I can give my best to not be considered an idiot. This, of course, is my insurance that if I fail (which I have) I still have the proper support to convince myself she’s the stupid one. It is childish, but now that I know that I’ve desperately try to change it. Now that I know that I was in my comfort zone I have to move. Not everyone’s moving.

It took me long enough to figure myself out. It is a weird exercise, buy you have to do it sometimes. With my friends, they are easy to read, but you have to know their stories. I can’t predict their behavior, but I can understand it. I see why they are depending on someone, why they can’t seem to create bonds. I understand their comfort zones. Of course, I can’t go around telling people how the fuck they are supposed to live. I know they have to change, I know they are holding back. But, truth be told, when you’re out of your comfort zone all you want to do is run back into the bunk bed and forget you were trying to open the windows or figure out how the human freezer your friend has for A/C works.

You can’t drag anyone out of their comfort zone. You can’t tell a shy person to ask a girl out in front of other people. You can’t tell a loverboy to cut back their fixation with a girl and, I tell you, you can’t tell and storyteller her princess is in another castle, or that he is fucking the wrong princess. People have to figure themselves out, trust me. Many times we hear stuff like “she saved me from that other bitch”. Fuck you, no one saved you. You just migrated your emotional bounds to a new host, which will be far easier to let go.

In the end, time flies. And with time the comfort disappears. It took me a long time to get up my bunk bed and open the windows, but it was a well learned lesson. I’m never freezing my feet again, and you shouldn’t. Not while you’re still young and have nobody to disappoint but yourself.

okbye!