Discomfort and Growth
Musings on Concepts
Growing, as anyone who’s been through adolescence can tell you, is not a comfortable process. This applies to one’s mind just as surely as one’s bones: to grow is to stretch, to bend, to break. Knobby knees and flailing limbs, acne and hormones, body odor and muscle aches - a growing body is uncomfortable to inhabit.
Growing one’s mind is beset by similar symptoms, the cognitive and emotional versions of growing pains. Headaches, heartsickness, self-doubt, confusion, anxiety - expanding one’s mind, particularly in difficult directions, is neither free nor easy.
Think of leaving a longstanding relationship, and how you have to relearn how to be single, or moving across the country to live in a completely different environment than the one you left behind. In both cases, basic aspects of one’s life have to be reassessed, recalculated, reaffirmed. Relationships, both with others and with oneself, have to be rebuilt. When a mind’s foundations move, the whole structure has to readjust.
Our minds are made comfortable by the familiar, the usual, the standard. We are at our safest when we can predict what happens next.
But to grow is to change, and change requires the unfamiliar, the unusual, the non-standard. Growth does not feel safe or familiar or comfortable, because change does not feel safe or familiar or comfortable. When one departs from the well-worn path, anything could happen.
One must be strict about one’s inferences, though: not all discomfort comes from growth. Not everything that hurts a person makes them stronger.
Sometimes discomfort indicates boundaries that should not be crossed. Sometimes a subconscious whisper is a warning from parts of ourselves that have processed information we have yet to fully imbibe. Sometimes warnings should be heeded, and paths less traveled stayed away from.
Does all growth find itself accompanied by discomfort?
It seems unreasonable to claim that every instance of growth takes place outside one’s comfort zone. One can grow a skill while comfortable in its practice, or learn a life lesson while comfortable in the presence of friends and family.
Perhaps there is a higher form of growth that is always accompanied by discomfort, but it is doubtful. One can grow from a secure home, like a tree anchored by its roots in nourishing soil, confident in flowering towards the sun’s benevolent rays.
So not all growth need be uncomfortable, and not all discomfort need find itself accompanied by growth.
Correlation and causation are brothers with a fractious relationship, always competing to claim responsibility for everything.
Does growth cause discomfort?
Does discomfort cause growth?
Or are they correlated for other reasons?
Because they are correlated, at least - more than chance would have it, if you seek to grow, you will find discomfort.
Is there a way to tell apart the discomfort that comes with growth from the discomfort that comes from the potential for lasting harm?
In the body, stress and injury are different things: muscles tear to become stronger, but tendons and ligaments are not meant to be so torn. Once bones break and fractures spread, once pain becomes agony and training becomes damage, the line has been crossed.
In the mind, we speak of lasting damage as trauma, from the Greek traumatikos "pertaining to a wound". Trauma does not make a person stronger. They may become stronger in response to their trauma - but they might also crumble like a house of cards, ill-considered, breath-blown. Trauma arises from some kind of violation of the mind’s expectations, a violent (whether figurative or literal) surprise that upends what a person believed to be true.
Discomfort can challenge a mind, can force it to confront its own inadequacies, but once the line has been crossed into violation, lasting damage results.
In the body, the line is between stress and injury.
In the mind, the line is between discomfort and trauma.
Each body and each mind may find these lines in different places within themselves, but each body and each mind have them, and these lines spell out where growth ends and damage begins.
Discomfort can then be thought of as a guide - a part of the self that understands where we are strong and where we are weak, and draws attention to our weakness out of cautious instinct. It is the shiver of anxiety upon the precipice of the new, the inner voice that urges against reckless exploration and paramount danger.
It is good to have this guide, because how else would we know where the path ends and the wilderness begins? But like all guides, its advice should not be listened to in every instance.
In order to become more, to become greater or better or stronger or even just more fully connected to ourselves and our humanity - sometimes we must set foot beyond the path, and chart new paths through untamed futures. And in time the wilds give way, new paths opening up, our guide there to delineate the newly-claimed from the still-unsurmounted.
Discomfort and growth, applied well, are a cyclical pair: discomfort shows the way for growth, which opens the path for new discomfort.