Your Comfort Zone Sucks

So here's the thing: comfort zones are bullshit. Comfort zone is a nice pretty lie of a phrase we use to convince ourselves that it's okay to work within our current limits, that being hurt by stretching for more is the worst thing ever. That writing or playing or composing (or performing any other act of creation you care to specify) should all be done within the scope of "what you know." What all of that really means is that you're staying small, and scared, and refusing to act.

But! You say. If I act then I'll be forced to keep acting. To follow through on my plans. I might, god forbid, have standards to live up to then.

Okay. Don't do anything, then.

Now you've got the self-hatred of not having done anything on top of the self-hatred spawned by making shit in the first place. I mean, assuming you're one of those people who stares at everything they've just done and whimpers that it could be so much better. If you're not, I don't want to hear from you: either you're wrong and I hate you, or worse, you're right and I hate you. Either way, I plan to use your guts in a very personal, very long anatomy lesson.

(Or you could be lying to me and/or yourself. If you need to lie about that shit, I mostly feel sorry for you. Because pity is what you hate most.)

I'm scared of what I'm doing all the fucking time. I was scared of putting up the short story today for the weekday murders (for those of you not familiar, @EvilGalProds contracted them out to @saalon while she was off-grid), because I have all kinds of voices about how I'm not a real writer. (Not the way I am a musician.) I'm scared of doing the recordings every week. I'm not a real musician. (I'm not getting paid. I don't have a band. I've never finished writing a song, never mind that I first started trying to write songs a month ago.) I'm scared of the lesson I've got with a new fiddle teacher on Monday, because she's won fiddle contests and has an album out and knows way more than me and is totally going to tell me this is a worthless endeavor. (One of these things is almost certainly a lie. I like to leave a little room for people to disappoint me, after all.) (Bonus points for spotting the reference.) I'm fucking terrified of going to Swannanoa Gathering for Celtic Week because I'll be old and outdated and everyone else will be better than me. I'm scared that this blog post is going to just rehash shit other people have said better and more convincingly.

But I'm doing all these things anyway. Half the things my mind throws up as roadblocks are depression and anxiety lies; the other half are things that might be true but I'll never, ever know if I don't try.

My fiddle teacher told me something a few lessons ago that changed the way I look at these things. She said, the performers who have no shame, who just let the bow fly over the strings and what happens, happens, and it all sounds glorious? Look at their body language. They're not hunching. Their chest is open, their head is up, and no matter how much they may be moving with the music, they're grounded in it. It may be an innate quality and not something I can learn - but I can learn to fake it by mimicking the body language.

I've broken out of a lot of comfort zones this year. I don't plan to stop, because for all that I piss and moan about doing it, for all that I swear at the people who are back there shoving me out into the limelight, I love it. I like myself a lot better now than I did three months ago. I like the direction my life is going. I could never have predicted any of this would happen, and I never would have done any of it if I hadn't stared my fears in the face, pulled my chin up and my shoulders back, and said a hearty fuck you.