I can’t tell you how many times people have encouraged me to “get out of (my) comfort zone.” They mean well when they say this. They seem to believe that since they’ve seen me do well in some area that, if I give myself a bit of a push, the abilities that helped me succeed in that area might be transferable to another, and I just might be good at that too. They assume that I actually am comfortable with what they’re seeing as my “comfort zone.”

This isn’t always true. Sometimes what looks like a comfort zone is not at all a comfortable place – but it’s a known one. It’s functional, even in its dysfunctionality. It feels like normal.

In a Weekend Assignment on the topic of “Fresh Starts” a few weeks ago, I talked about my post-divorce move to California and some of the adjustments that followed:

Supposedly, two years is a benchmark for recovery from a divorce…it took me a bit longer to feel ready to move on, but eventually it happened. It took the understanding that the feelings that I had come to accept as my “new normal” really weren’t so normal, and acting on that understanding in therapy, before it could, though – and that was effectively a fresh start on my fresh start.

That two-year benchmark was more like three for me, and is my personal best example of an uncomfortable comfort zone. (My next best example is the last few years of my first marriage, which is also a good illustration of the strength of inertia, and is not what I intend to talk about right now.)

On my own for the first time in my adult life, I had a decent job, a pretty nice apartment, extended family nearby, and my dog to keep me company. My son was away at university, and I really didn’t have to answer to or account for my time to anyone – well, except for the dog, who needed me on a pretty reliable feeding-and-walking schedule.

Daily life for me wasn’t much more than commuting to and from work, spending the day at the office, and heading home to spend the evening with Gypsy, a quiet dinner, and maybe some television and a book. My days started early, and a 40-mile commute each way meant that I didn’t usually feel up to doing much else after I got home, to be honest. Social activities that didn’t involve my sister and her family were very rare, and even those didn’t happen as often as one might think they would. Not being outgoing by nature, the idea of joining activities on my own where I’d meet other people was daunting at best, terrifying at worst.

All of this was complicated by the fact that I didn’t really begin to come to terms, emotionally, with the end of my first marriage until after I moved away; I needed the physical distance from my ex-husband to start processing it all. And much of the time, it didn’t feel that the processing moved very far beyond “start.” There were “up” periods, such as the months I worked toward and reached my Lifetime Member status with Weight Watchers, and the project that helped forge the bond with the person who became my “office spouse” for awhile, but for the most part, my life felt like it was in a low valley, and I was getting accustomed to it. I had turned forty, I had raised one child and had no intention of doing that again, and I was alone. When I tried to look ahead, I couldn’t imagine being in a different place; I saw another thirty-some-odd years of “more of the same” in my future. Sometimes I felt almost crushed by that, and that sense of loss and powerlessness started to seem ordinary after awhile.

I was coming to accept that I was better, more truly “myself,” now that I was no longer with First Husband. At the same time, the idea of eventually being with someone else felt wrong and disloyal at some level (ironic in the face of the fact that his involvement with someone else was one of the major catalysts for our mostly “friendly” divorce). While I felt that I’d like to have another long-term relationship at some point in my life, I lacked whatever it took to do anything about making that happen. It was easy to declare that I “just wasn’t ready.” I was still hurting over the divorce, and the fact that the divorce was, for the most part, a “friendly” one sometimes seemed to make moving forward that much harder.

The hurt and the stagnation were just part of my everyday life. They felt familiar, and they became what passed for normal. It was the kind of thing that can require something from the outside to shake it up, and once again the shaking came from my ex-husband – this time, his letting me know that he was getting married again. It’s not that I ever really thought we’d get back together – or even that I really wanted that after all this time. However, sometimes I still felt like our separation was temporary in some ways, and that eventually we might be old together (even if we didn’t grow old together), so this announcement seemed to close a door. That door needed closing, though, and it did open the proverbial “other” door; it’s what it took to finally get me to find a good therapist, and to come to understand at last that what I’d learned to live with as my “new normal” was far from it.

Breaking out of that “normal” was one of the hardest – and ultimately healthiest – things I’ve ever done. It taught me that it’s pretty easy for me to retreat into a pretty small life, and that such a retreat is not ultimately good for me. It taught me that those people who have encouraged me to get out of my comfort zone just might have known what they were talking about.

How comfortable are you with your own comfort zone? If you’d like to talk more about it, join the Hump Day Hmm and add your post to the list at Using My Words, Julie Pippert’s blog.

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