Out of the comfort zone

I recently started a podcast called New Material with my friend Hamza Khan. It’s been an incredibly energizing project, and has stretched my creative abilities in all sorts of ways I couldn’t have imagined.

Even though I write here every day, I mostly stay in my comfort zone. Without thinking too much about it, I avoid the difficult, important, unpleasant, topics that I’m scared to write about. By contrast, in a conversation, I’m able to lower my guard. I’m not writing to think, I’m speaking to think, and I don’t have time and energy to disguise or clean up the raw emotion. There’s even less time to lie.

Our latest episode was about creative imposter syndrome, and I took the conversation into a place I didn’t expect. I talked about a really painful project that I took on—including how I felt like the worst writer on a team, and feeling much more hurt than I knew I should have felt, and how it really tested my confidence and endurance. 

One of the significant things I realized about myself was this: I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. As I recorded the podcast, and for many days and nights after, I worried about it a lot. I wondered if I shared too much, and worried that I wasn’t speaking with a healthy sense of respect or unfairness. Hamza told me something that really stuck with me though: 

Tell the story more, because it is not their story, it is your story. You worked with them, and I know you want to protect their identities, and you can be artful about doing that. You absolutely can. But the experience of going through that is something that is powerful, and I think it’s unveiling itself right now in this episode. We’re talking openly about what it’s like to be us.

I’m really grateful to have recorded the episode with Hamza. It taught me something new about myself, and it was a chance to put together some new material.

2 responses to “Out of the comfort zone”

  1. I have been a reader for a long while, and I am immensely curious as to the “ difficult, important, unpleasant, topics that I’m scared to write about.”

    Not that you need to write about them, I’m just curious as to what the topics are.

    • Thanks for reading and commenting, Trent! Many other topics, here are some: managing waves of insomnia, meditating every day in order to help me regulate my emotions, writing vs. chasing meaningful status, etc. (The topics bring up varying difficult emotions, not just fear)

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