Press In to the Uncomfortable

It’s 6 am and I’m sitting cross-legged on my bed, with a cup of coffee attempting to mask the smell of paint surrounding me. This week my bedroom is getting a fresh coat of paint, a complete transformation. It’s changing from a mismatched yellow and black room with walls covered in photos and trick tapestries and lights strung up to simple white walls, full of intention and meaning. It’s changing from haphazardly tacked up posters to carefully planned photos of memories and pieces full of character.

To look at my room now, you’d never know what it looked like a few short days ago.

But really, to look at me now, you’d never know what I looked like a few short weeks ago. You’d never know the changes that have taken place over the past weeks, the past year.

It’s been a while since I’ve written, I know. Honestly, I’ve surprised myself with how little I’ve written over the past months—and by little, I mean none. I can count on one hand the times I’ve cracked open my journal and scratched out a few words since the day I stepped off the plane from Kathmandu. In some ways, many ways really, I think I’m still processing through everything that happened this year, especially this summer. So much has happened, so much has changed. And the reality of my time in Nepal didn’t hit me fully when I was standing there in July, but it rocked my world when I was at home in October. I didn’t ask the hard questions about poverty and unreached peoples and how in the world can my life have any hint of purpose? until I returned home and settled back into routines of life. When I was in Kathmandu, spending hours with Sakina and breathing in that awful smoke of Pashupati, I simply soaked in everything going on around me. But it wasn’t until four or five months later that it really, really hit me. I asked the hard questions, I wrestled with the painful emotions. But yet? I still don’t have answers. Nepal still feels like a raw place in my heart. It was beautiful, but it was so hard. It changed me. It sent me reeling so hard that I didn’t know how to talk about it. I didn’t know where to begin writing about it. Because if you don’t even know how to process things in your own mind, how are you ever supposed to write or clean it up into a nice, neat little blog post with a pretty bow on top?

This semester was difficult; in ways I literally cannot explain. But instead of writing, instead of pressing in to the uncomfortable and working through the hard questions, I ran. I used anything and everything to escape reality, to avoid the hard things that I didn’t want to deal with, to pretend that I didn’t feel like everything was such a mess. I could sleep it off, walk away, refuse to think about it. But still, my world felt like it was falling apart. (Because yeah, Netflix seems to help when you’re feeling down, giving an escape for forty minutes or ninety minutes or two hours and three episodes—but when you close the computer and walk back into reality, the hard thing is still there. There are still difficult things to wrestle through, still emotions that flood back. Running, escaping, avoiding—it doesn’t work. I’ve tried it.)

I still don’t know how to put words into the simply raw emotion I’ve felt this year. But now, as the calendar flips and seasons of life change, I do know that I’m done running, and I’m ready to press in. I’m trying to work through, to fight for growth and to pursue change. I’m done living in the fear that my world is falling apart, and I’m ready to ask why I feel that way. I’m ready to press in and to deal with it and to embrace the change instead of running away from it. It was our mantra in Nepal, anyways. We daily reminded each other to press in to the uncomfortable, to look the discomfort square in the face and to press in. We worked together, pressing in to the uncomfortable heat or smells or dirty bathrooms or Daal Baht for the fifth time that week. The reminder to press in changed the way I approached life-- but when the uncomfortable became less obvious and more mundane, more abstract and less tangible, I forgot to press in and instead I ran.

Life now, sitting in this room with still-wet paint, looks very different than I imagined it’d be when I came back from halfway around the world. I’m not where I thought I’d be six months ago, nor where I truly want to be, if I’m honest.

But I’m ready for a change.

Sometimes that change is hard, like when your world turns upside down and what was once comfortable is painfully not comfortable anymore. It’s hard when you are faced with deep hurts and almost-relationships that don’t work out and disappointed hopes. It’s hard when change comes and you feel as if you’re drowning, struggling to catch your footing every single day.

But other times, that change is good and beautiful. It’s like a fresh coat of paint, covering up imperfections and failures and blemishes. It’s grace and it’s needed. Sometimes change looks more like flipping a calendar and moving forward with a new year. Sometimes change is realizing that life keeps moving on, and what I’ve learned is this: it’s easier to press in to the uncomfortable than it is to outrun it. You’re never going to outrun it, the uncomfortable is here to stay.

“Hard things just keep calling you because you’re meant to answer to higher and better things.”
This, here and now, is where I grow. This uncomfortable, this hard, this difficult. This struggle to figure out what in the whole wide world am I going to do with my life? and to make this semester count-- this is the uncomfortable that matters. This is the difficult and the hard that nourishes growth and it can be the good, grace-filled kind of change, if I'll let it be. So my resolution for the year: press in.

It's worth it.