discomfort

Tonight I discovered a pop up collection of stands just off Union Square market filled with Asian food and a wide variety of all sorts of unrelated items, from hand crafted lamps and an array of fake pearl jewelry, to crochet animal and scary mini carpets from Tibet, all staffed by young people selling their wares enthusiastically. 

One block print artist had a piece on display called: comfort in the discomfort. She called it her life’s motto and said it so calmly and casually, almost happily. That’s always been my life’s motto although for me it’s been all about negativity and self destructive tendencies. I couldn’t wrap my head around hearing those words with a positive or even neutral twist. Much of my life was spent in struggle and I alway felt that familiarity of the pain was better than letting go and perhaps discovering things that were even worse. Comfort in the discomfort. Summarized my eating disorder for sure. I mentioned that to the artist and she looked so surprised that my connection with those words held such pain. 

I wanted to support and thought about buying a print but my goal is to find comfort in what is, not comfort in what makes life harder for me. And that was kind of cool to realize - I don’t feel comfortable with that as my life motto anymore.