When I was getting my teaching certificate, an Education professor told me that in order for students to learn, they had to go from a
place of discomfort to comfort.
Think about that for a moment.
Most of us are perfectly content to stay right where we are,
thank you very much. We want to believe what we believe, think what we think and stay where we are. Changing our thoughts and minds is upsetting. If we’ve
believed that the earth is flat and someone comes along and says it’s round, we’re bound to be confused. Our worldview has literally been disrupted.
Now we are uncomfortable and agitated. We need to right
ourselves again. Perhaps we go to Google and see if we can confirm what we
already believed, or discover more evidence for this new information. Or we
need to talk about it. Process it. And once we’ve read enough, researched
enough, and/or talked to enough people and processed our feelings about this
new information, we either accept or reject it. We either learn something new
or stay where we are. But in order to learn, we have to go through this
discomfort.
It’s what I did in my classroom with my students. An English
teacher challenges you about what you read. An English teacher asks questions,
teases out thoughts and responses, pushes you to consider something you may not
have seen or challenges your interpretation. This can be a jarring
experience. Students can rebel, argue or just be plain confused. But no matter
where the students wind up, a good teacher is disruptive. A good teacher will
challenge the students and make them uncomfortable.
In order to learn, we must change. We must go from a state
of discomfort (confusion, fear, pain) to a place of comfort (understanding,
acceptance, enlightenment). I’d even go so far as to say that change is
not only difficult, it's ugly.
Consider the butterfly. We talk about the
caterpillar transforming into the beautiful butterfly. But what about the
process of metamorphosis itself? Isn’t it ugly? Isn’t it disturbing? Just look at
the word “pupa.” That is one ugly word. Consider the process of shedding one’s
cocoon or skin. Molting? It’s the stuff of horror films. Whether it be
humanoids encased in jellied eggs in Invasion
of the Body Snatchers or Jeff Goldblum’s face erupting into greasy insect
skin in The Fly, metamorphosis is one ugly process.
It makes sense. In order to change from one thing into
another, the prior self must be destroyed. Yes it is replaced with something
far more beautiful and evolved, but the process of change itself can be violent and
unpleasant.
I think it’s the main reason people avoid therapy. To change
your inner self, to undergo the metamorphosis of the psyche requires addressing
the ugly stuff that’s buried within that nice cocoon you’ve built. You’ve got
to rip it apart. Chew your way out from within. Destroy everything you’ve known
in order to be reborn.
Change is hard. We say those three little words as if it
makes it easier. As though it’s easily summed up. Heck, I’ve used that phrase
myself to help cope with it. For instance I’ve recently changed jobs. I knew it would
be hard, but I didn’t know it would be this hard. Yes, it is good for me. Yes,
I was stagnating after staying in the same place for seven years. But damn, it’s
really hard! I wake up from anxiety dreams where everyone at a meeting speaks a
foreign language or speaks so softly I can’t hear them. I grind my teeth at
night and my jaw aches. It’s only my second week at the new gig, so it’s not
the end of the world.
But I didn’t expect it to be quite this hard.
I’m also in therapy and I’m working on a memoir with a
writing coach. Those are acts of transformation. And they are harder than I
thought they would be. Facing the truth about what I’ve been through and who I've become is incredibly difficult. We bury our pain for a reason. And I’m one to pull my
finger away from anger as though I’ve touched something hot.
But you can’t look at where you’ve been and what you’ve
become—and not have to cope with whatever it is you were hiding from in the first place. In my case it's anger. I don't like to be angry and I don't like conflict. I'd rather shove it all deep within my belly and not deal with it. If you're familiar with that strategy of dealing with trauma, you'll know that it's not particularly effective. When you bury all the hurt and anger of being abused and neglected as a child, that sort of pain festers. You haven't eliminated it at all. Instead, you've let it metastasize within you and it will consume you. It will make you sick. If you root it out and deal with it in the light of day, no matter how painful that process, you've at least got a shot at healing. At transforming even.
And all of this is ugly. It is destructive. And it makes it
difficult to write here. It makes it difficult to cope with the aftermath of
writing about my eating disorder on the Huffington
Post. When all you have ever done is work to hide such things, it is
indeed difficult to reveal them.
It’s ugly.
It’s destructive.
And yet I want to fly.