Reframing Discomfort
About once a year, I go to Peru to visit my in-laws. The trip is as challenging as it is special. I’m an introvert with two cousins and enough Spanish to order at a restaurant. Gab, my husband, has so many cousins they can field a full 11-11 soccer match. Their primary mode of gathering is in large groups with rapid fire inside jokes, political commentary, and salacious gossip. Suffice it to say, “El ceviche es [sic] muy rico,” only gets me so far.
While my in-laws often graciously switch to English around me, I’ve had many hours of practicing the art of appearing engaged, while having no clue what’s going on. I imagine this is what it’s like to be a kid or hard of hearing.* Eventually, a mix of boredom, loneliness, and exhaustion sets in.
At one point, a cousin checked-in on me, sharing how infuriating, even intolerable, she found being in groups where she can’t speak the language. Huh, I thought, that reaction hadn’t even crossed my mind. Intolerable? Her reaction was “get me out of here” (avoidance) and mine was “this is where I am” (acceptance). I got curious about why.
For me, the discomfort of being immersed in something foreign or challenging, went hand in hand with expansion and adventure. It was part of exchange, part of shedding a version of myself en route to discovering something even richer.
In coaching sessions, I started to be extra tuned to what people perceive as intolerable vs. uncomfortable. I noticed how people often conflate the two, and, as a result, avoid doing things that are aligned with what they care about. As we untangled it, discomfort got reframed as a necessary and valuable skill in creating the version of ourselves and the world we want to see. Something that is often less bad and painful than we feared. Something we need to practice like strength training, or more accurately, resistance training.
On our back way to the Lima airport, I passed a truck that had particularly Peruvian hand lettering on it. I found myself surprisingly and preemptively nostalgic. I was going to miss this place. In the discomfort, something else had taken seed. I wouldn’t say I was fond of the insistent dust, whimsically enforced rules, or bumper car style driving, but I saw the gift woven in. The gift of intimately experiencing another person’s home and land, of being invited in, and of seeing who you (and they) become in that process. Yes, the ceviche is indeed muy rico.
Related Reads:
In psychology, there’s the idea of expanding your window of tolerance. While it’s often in the context of helping people with PTSD or phobias (i.e. to increase tolerance of their triggers or fears), it’s a toolkit I think everyone can benefit from. For example, you could use the tools around exposure to increase your tolerance and agility in hard situations/conversations/ideas. Or, use the tools around emotional and nervous system regulation to manage your stress and lead with more confidence.
Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night by Morgan Parker for the poetry lovers.
*In situations where your needs/experience is often systemically de-valued and ignored (like kids, people with disabilities, or any group that’s been historically made marginalized), the conversation about comfort goes in a totally different direction. I think of it more into the category of things we tolerate that we should not vs things we can't tolerate that we should.
