Transcript: Episode 8

Hey friends, and thanks for being here for today’s episode. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.

Today I’m going to be sharing some thoughts I’ve been percolating lately about a specific type of general life outlook that we are often encouraged to have, and that I think can have some unexpected influences on the way we create and the way we write. I’m still sort of working through my full train of thought on this, but I’m diving into it today from where I’m currently at.

If you are a human adult – which as far as I know all listeners of this podcast are – you have undoubtedly heard this bit of life wisdom somewhere along your way: “You only grow when things are hard.” Incarnations of this advice pop up in pretty much any context you can imagine, and in all sorts of snappy wordings: “No pain, no gain,” or “Growth and comfort do not coexist,” or my personal Tony Robbins fav “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”

I’m not sure if this sub-genre of self-help is as thoroughly ubiquitous anywhere else as it is in America – I would guess it’s not, maybe not even in fellow Anglophone cultures. But I think this is still a common trope of capitalist culture in general, particularly in its current form of hustle entrepreneurship. It’s the Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” ethos applied to the level of the individual.

For my listeners outside the US, if you have different takes on this topic after listening to this episode I would love to hear about them. I almost started to try to research which cultures are most enthusiastic about vilifying the comfort zone, and how that developed over time, because I’m sure it’s fascinating… but then I realized I’d probably spend days happily doing that instead of actually just making this episode.

Anyway, suffice to say: Americans in particular are very much on team “if it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you,” and we apply this barometer to virtually all aspects of life. (Or at least, to the aspects of life where we aren’t supposed to be chasing material comfort at all costs, figuratively and literally – more on that later.)

In the weeks that I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to say in this episode, I heard versions of this “no pain, no gain” advice connected to career, family, dating, health, spirituality, and, of course, to writing – and here’s the quick version of what I’ve decided about it.

This idea is at best only half of the equation, and as such, it’s… kind of bullshit.

I do understand why the trope is so compelling. Even its corniest formulations are tapping into a vital reality of the human experience (and even of the cosmos, if you want to zoom out that far).

Disruption and crisis play an unavoidable and fundamentally transformative role in the world – both when we seek disruption in service of deeper discovery, and when disruption comes to us unbidden in the form of hardship or grief. Maybe we’ve actively chosen to uproot something that has reached an end, or maybe the ground has unexpectedly shifted under us. But either way, these disruptions carry powerful meaning along with the discomfort or pain. And storytelling is often the core of how we create that meaning and bring it forward with us.

For writers, that storytelling is literal. Painful experiences often inform our work, whether we’re writing a memoir, a poem, or a novel. There can be huge personal and cultural power in crafting stories from the places where we’ve been wounded, and that’s part of the storyteller’s vocation.

So, maybe as a creative, soulful sort of human you aren’t particularly swayed by corporate-speak like “On the other side of your comfort zone is your optimized potential” (and no, I did not make that one up).

But maybe you’ve also heard this common creative guidance: “Your deepest wound is the source of your deepest story.” And maybe that one sounds pretty compelling and true.

I’m honestly not sure whether it’s true or not – since deep wounds are indeed pathways to deep experience, transformation, and meaning, maybe the deepest story really is inherently a wounded one. But I’m not entirely convinced it has to be – and I’m confident that wounded stories aren’t the only deep stories, the only stories with value and life.

After all, if life truly does only begin at the end of our comfort zones, if the only real meaning comes from crisis, discomfort, and disruption… aren’t we throwing out a huge portion of life as being fundamentally empty?

Storytellers are people who are permeable to the world, who are open to the narrative and mythic possibilities of our experience – that, I think, is the source of our drive to make meaning through stories.

So here’s the core of what I’m exploring today: How can we be just as permeable to the meaning and possibility of the ordinary or comfortable as we are to the meaning of disruption and suffering? And what stories do we miss out on when the wound becomes the whole of the work?

Just to repeat a key piece of my thesis, I’m not discounting the power of the wound, the potential for growth within suffering. That’s not what I’m questioning in this episode. But I am questioning the line where crafting insight from our suffering becomes a dogmatic belief that insight inherently requires our suffering. That suffering is the only place insight lives, the only thread of our experience that can teach us anything true and transformative.

It sounds sort of odd when it’s phrased that way – and yet this is what principles like “nothing grows in the comfort zone” are actually, literally saying to us. And when we apply this brand of wisdom to our creative work, we can end up inadvertently nurturing another uncomfortable but weirdly beloved trope: the “suffering” or “tortured” artist.

To fully flesh out some context here, I want to circle back to something I alluded to earlier. (This is going to be one of those segments that might feel like a pretty wide tangent, but it does ultimately tie into writing practice.)

There is a deep contradiction at the center of mainstream American culture: We’re supposed to be constantly striving toward maximizing our own material comfort and security, and we’re told the way to do that is by continually embracing personal disruption, struggle, and risk.

If we work for a company, we’re supposed to strive for recognition and promotions, even if the expectations are exploitative or just don’t make sense for our lives – both because we should always want to make more money no matter what, and because are we even living if we’re not struggling past the edge of our comfort zone and optimizing our potential?

If we’re working for ourselves, either by choice or by gig economy circumstance, the pressure to strive and risk can be even more acute. When discomfort is the barometer for growth and you’re also in a situation where the line between work and life is so readily blurred, it’s incredibly easy for your life to become one giant practice of discomfort – no matter how much material success you have or haven’t reached.

The idea of ever choosing to stop at enough – at our current comfort zone – is synonymous with a lack of ambition, with laziness, or even with stupidity. Making the most money possible (and also hoarding it) is supposedly how we access the most security and freedom. From that lens, choosing to decline to risk and strive for more comfort in favor of just enjoying the comfort you’ve already got doesn’t really compute.

All of this can ultimately combine to create a self-fulfilling prophecy about growth being impossible within the comfortable or the ordinary. When your current level of material comfort or personal achievement is never culturally allowed to feel like enough, it’s difficult to find deep meaning and possibility there. The new level of achievement we stepped out of our comfort zone to reach is now just the next comfort zone to reject.

And there’s another layer to the self-fulfilling prophecy. In a culture where both your value as a person and your material security are fundamentally tied to your ability to earn ever-increasing amounts of money, there isn’t ever really full security. Because your ability to earn can always go away. Disruption and discomfort can always come to you instead of you going to it. The narrative that striving for more is always worth it, will always make your life better and safer, can very easily fall apart under the weight of the unexpected.

Of course, if you actually don’t have enough, if you’re already struggling to survive, then the narrative makes even less sense. (“I see you’re currently suffering under a lack of societal support and basic material security – have you considered optimizing your potential by going outside your comfort zone? No pain, no gain!”)

So why are we so ready to buy into the idea that ordinary and enough are inherently meaningless or not valuable? (And here I mean “we” as in the vast majority of society.)

I think a big part of it is fear. We’re afraid of the reality that suffering and comfort aren’t actually mutually exclusive experiences. Or in other words, that comfort doesn’t protect us from change. Our dominant culture isn’t really built to acknowledge that even the ordinary, the known, and the comfortable holds a foundational seed of uncertainty at its center – and that uncertainty can’t be controlled. We don’t grow when we’re comfortable because we’re deluding ourselves that comfort is truly synonymous with stability.

It’s not actually the comfort in and of itself that holds us back – it’s the mollifying certainty that because something is familiar, we’ve already experienced everything it has to offer.

Certainty inherently denies the simple reality that things are still, and always, changing and unknown. This is the only hard truth, no matter what’s happening to us or how we’re dealing with it. To be alive is to live with the prospect of unknown yet inevitable transformation.

And yes, sometimes that uncertainty emerges as disruption, as suffering. So that constant unknown can become the closet under the stairs where our anxiety grows itself, munching on spiders and old shoelaces and all the unwanted crap we shove down there into the dark. And it can feel like that’s all darkness is – night terrors and monsters, or at least just junk we should probably throw away.

But darkness, that which is there but has no shape, is also the hideaway of hope. It’s where our dreams come from, our imagination, our storytelling. Darkness – the presence of uncertainty –  gives us the freedom to create and to invent. In darkness, we know that things can and do and will change.

It won’t be like this forever, we think, and we feel afraid because we know it’s true.

It won’t be like this forever, we say, and we know it means we’re alive, and that we’re not finished yet.

This might be starting to sound suspiciously like just a quasi-poetic formulation of “no pain, no gain.” But here’s the bit that the trope overlooks: That generative, visionary side of uncertainty is still present in the comfort zone. Which inherently means that possibility, life, wonder, and growth are still available in the familiar and the ordinary. We just have to be curious and attentive enough to expose it.

We don’t see the ever-present potential for growth because we aren’t looking for it… until something deeply, utterly uncomfortable happens and forces us to acknowledge that change was actually right there all along. Life – in all its dark, glorious, and unknown potential – wasn’t actually waiting safely at the edge of the comfort zone.

So, is it possible for fear to keep us quote-unquote “stuck in our comfort zone” in ways that prevent us from fully experiencing life? Yes, absolutely. Is it possible for fear to also keep us constantly dashing straight out of the comfort zone without even looking around to see what’s really there? Also yes.

Even the ordinary and the comfortable has a bright-shining edge where what we know now folds into the dark of what we don’t know yet (or what we’ve forgotten). Sometimes, it takes suffering, voluntary or otherwise, for us to meet and cross that edge. But sometimes – and maybe even often – it doesn’t.

Okay, so… how does all of that somewhat grandiose philosophizing connect to artistic struggle, to the perverse ideal of the suffering, tortured artist? The contradiction at the heart of the “move fast and break things” narrative is, I think, a uniquely limiting one for people with artistic vocations. And it creates a very weird, skewed set of ideals that we can often apply to our vocations without realizing it.

The promised trade-off for taking risks, for constantly dragging yourself out of the comfort zone (or even for enthusiastically leaping out of the comfort zone) is supposed to be growth, fulfillment, and security – as measured by financial gain. That’s the boon that props up the narrative, that occludes the core reality that continual striving doesn’t actually always equal increased security (or even increased meaning).

But when you’re trying to do artistic work, you tend to not get the boon. It’s certainly possible to access financial gain through art – but it’s not realistically possible for all artists.

This leaves us essentially with only the striving half of the narrative. We’ve been taught that striving is always inherently valuable – it’s an invisible base assumption. So in the absence of monetary value for our work, I think we naturally tend to over-identify with the striving, with the ethic of struggle. And that can influence the entire way we conceive of what it means to be storytellers. Artistic struggle itself can become the wound that we think will birth our deepest story.

A little over a year ago, I received this piece of advice about reclaiming my creative life: I didn’t have to tear all my wounds open to do it. On the one hand, this sounded quite appealing. But on the other, it also sort of confounded me. Aren’t the wounds where all the good stuff is? Doesn’t true, vulnerable, enlivened storytelling require continually tearing stuff open?

Sometimes in our desire to see or unlock the power within the wound, we end up getting entranced by it – we start to think that the wound, in and of itself, is the power. The wound is the story – the only story. And once we’ve decided that, then the next logical assumption is that if we’re not absorbed in the wound, if we’re not actively suffering or if we’re not pushing ourselves to the edge of punishment in our work, then we’re not telling any stories worth exploring. Instead of being one potential portal to the art, suffering becomes the whole of the art.

One way that I’ve noticed this conceptual fallacy playing out is in the work of storytellers who base their art around living outside of mainstream culture. I have a big soft spot for creative nonfiction writers and content creators who live off grid or practice extreme minimalism or travel fulltime – the last sort of person you’d expect to be following mainstream standards for assessing the value and meaning in their lives.

And yet, so often the invisible (or even overt) assumption about the value of striving and challenge – no matter the context – is still very much at work in the way these storytellers craft meaning out of their experiences. One example of this is the travel filmmaker Eva zu Beck, who I’ve been following for the past few years. She’s recently grappled publicly with the intense creative and physical burnout that comes from conflating struggle with growth or meaning. (One of these videos is linked in the show notes, and zu Beck is a very compelling storyteller and filmmaker, so I recommend checking out her work.)

She has talked about the feelings of obligation and shame that can develop out of a natural desire to explore and grow, in her case specifically through things like physically demanding challenges and travel to dangerous locations. When you’re the kind of storyteller who has created work out of running ultramarathons on remote mountain trails and who has camped in a snowstorm in Antarctica… it’s pretty easy to see how a creative ethic of “nothing ever grows in the comfort zone” can get acutely unsustainable.

Unless you also live out of a backpack and write about it, this example might seem too extreme for thinking about more mundane flavors of suffering in the name of art. But I actually think it’s illuminating to see the creative desire for deep, vulnerable, raw storytelling taken to one possible extreme.

Humans are in many ways wired for crisis and for extremes – we have to be in order to survive. So there are types of meaningful experience we only access through distress and disruption, for better and for worse. This can look like the ecstatic high of the exhausted marathon runner. It can look like the catharsis and discovery that comes from writing the story of a deep life wound.

Or it can look like a writing practice and creative life that’s become nothing but striving, no freedom for play and presence and contentment.

When we get too attached to the creative power of the wound – when we buy into the belief that there is no creativity or growth outside of crisis – that’s when we end up worshipping at the altar of the suffering artist. We conflate our suffering with our value. We might even resist the full creative potential of working through our wounds. Because if we heal them, what the hell will we write about?

(Of course, creative healing isn’t ever a one-and-done thing; but that’s a tangent for another episode.)

I think there are two key questions to consider in order to shift our experience – to get un-entranced with the wound. Number 1: How might we begin to acknowledge and validate our artistic struggles without valorizing struggle as an end in itself, as the primary marker of creative value and vulnerability? And number 2: How can we practice finding creative meaning in the ordinary (and even, dare I say, in the comfortable)?

I’m going to offer myself and my relationship with this podcast as another case study in the way that hidden assumptions about striving and challenge can basically screw up a creative project.

You will likely not be surprised to hear that I work from a script when I’m recording these episodes; I do ad lib as well, but each episode gets written basically as an essay first. This is partly because I do all the production work, and the audio editing is way easier and faster when I have a script. But the full-fledged scripts also come out of the relational way that I’ve tried to approach this podcast as a storytelling practice.

I don’t know what the episodes are really going to be about until I’m completely finished writing them. I start with a general, sometimes vague concept or question, and then I take 2-3 writing sessions and just… see where they go on the page. It feels like the podcast and I are sort of noodling around with the concept together, and that the final result is what the podcast wants to say as much or more than what I might have originally wanted to say.

Podcasts are often interviews, and in my case it’s sort of like I’m interviewing the podcast? Or the podcast is interviewing me?? It’s weird, maybe, but for the most part it works really well for this project. The writing process has been much more fluid and less fraught than my typical history with my writing.

But this month was… more challenging. I had a bit of a mental health flare-up early in the month that required shuffling my calendar around, and so I didn’t get to scripting the pod when I’d originally planned to, and then when I did get to it the process felt sort of like walking in circles in a mud pit. And I found myself thinking, these scripts have always ended up somewhere I’m really happy with and excited to share – but this one is going to be the first one that just sucks. I can feel it, it’s happening, the joyful discovery phase is done.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that back at the end of June, after the sixth episode dropped, I made a conscious shift in the way I was thinking about this project. I started to feel like, okay, I’ve made six episodes, I’m feeling familiar with this creative process, it’s obviously time to think more actively about how to help the podcast grow and reach more people.

With the hindsight that has come from making this episode, I realize now that this shift in the way I was thinking was also a shift out of creative mode and into striving mode – into “nothing grows in the comfort zone.” I wasn’t approaching it that way consciously; I didn’t see originally that this month’s topic was actually directly about me and the pod.

But I realize now that over the past couple months I’ve gradually fallen right into an ingrained narrative about my own comfort zone, one that many self-employed people know all too well. When it comes to marketing my work, if I’m not actively uncomfortable with pretty much everything I’m doing – if I’m not constantly in that headspace of striving and pushing and finding the next uncomfortable area for growth – then I’m doing it wrong.

It’s never allowed to feel good. If it does, I’m clearly not pushing myself enough. I’m missing out on my own potential. And then of course there’s the fear that if I do push myself and it doesn’t immediately pay off, it’s obviously because my work has no value and I suck.

That’s the wound that I brought right into the center of this creative project this month, completely unconsciously.

I think this is often the energy we start to bring to our creative lives as soon as we start conceiving of our work as something we want to take seriously. Something that really matters to us (even if it’s not part of our actual job). All that training we’ve received that real, valuable work is difficult and that your own value is measured by your willingness and ability to successfully pull up your bootstraps with all your might – all of that work ethic can become our creative ethic without us even realizing it.

It bears repeating here that I’m not saying working hard is bad or that being challenged and uncomfortable isn’t sometimes necessary or illuminating. But there has to be some kind of active balance. We have to find ways of holding onto the value of what’s comfortable for us, ways of nurturing our capacity to keep finding wonder and possibility and growth within what’s familiar and ordinary.

(Just as a side note: I once saw a possibly dubious stat that most podcasts don’t release more than seven episodes. I started feeling pretty comfortable with this pod at episode six… so maybe that’s around the time the novelty has worn off and people assume that means they’re over it, or they stress themselves out so much chasing growth that they just quit.)

In last month’s episode on creative values, I mentioned how a certain kind of story can require you to become a certain kind of storyteller – that we have to evolve and change to meet the story on common ground. Sometimes this is a classic “now exiting the comfort zone” kind of experience. But I think (I hope) that there are also powerful ways to evolve and change and expand into comfort, into a creative ethic of the ordinary. And I think there are meaningful stories waiting to meet us there – stories that we won’t find if we only ever focus on the wound.

In a culture that doesn’t want us to stand still and value the ordinary (because then we might quit striving for more and more stuff), that actually feels pretty powerfully disruptive.

Which… maybe kind of invalidates my original thesis? Like, if staying in the comfort zone is disruptive and uncomfortable, maybe we are actually leaving the comfort zone by staying in the comfort zone???

Anyway, my final point is this: Yes, sometimes you’ll have to push yourself in ways that are uncomfortable. Sometimes you’ll even suffer, and you’ll craft deep and wonderous and vital stories out of that suffering. But your creative power doesn’t lie solely in suffering. Storytelling is more than constant suffering, even more than constant striving. So you’re allowed to have a practice of storytelling that’s more than that, too.

This is what I’m personally going to be experimenting with – finding ways to help me maintain my living relationship with this podcast, instead of gradually turning it into an empty, stressful chore and a repository for all the ways I have failed to optimize my potential.

If you’re a member of the newsletter circle, check your inbox for two prompts to help you get started with your own experimentation. And if you’re not currently getting the monthly tips to put the ideas from the pod actually into practice, you can join us by scrolling down on whatever device or page you’re listening from – just look for the link right above the episode resources section.

And as always, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.