Hey party people,
So I graduated high school. I’M FREEEEEE! But I’m actually feeling kind of nostalgic and weird right with my new freedom. I’m leaving my comfortable little bubble and going off into the scary, big, collegiate world full of new people and new situations. College is a big transition in general, but it’s an especially big transition for me because I’m moving alllllll the way across the country. Yikes. Me + Change = Disaster.
But I digress—as I walked down the aisle during the graduation ceremony, my English teacher (who is actually the best person ever) handed me the book Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk (the dude who wrote Fight Club.) In it, she wrote a note about how it’s an odd but eye opening read. Judging by the cover, (a drawing of a princess with blood on the place where her mouth would be) I assumed it would indeed be quite odd. Then I was like Sara, have you learned NOTHING? Never judge a book by its cover. I feel like I’ve failed life. I just graduated high school and I still judge books by their covers.
Anyways, since I’ve got a couple hours commute every day, I get a looot of time to read. And I’m not complaining. So I cracked open the book the next day and started to read. The book reminded me much of a mixture of Catcher in the Rye, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and someone trippin’ on LSD. Seriously. I was only 20 pages in, and I was already so confused. I was like what the heck did my teacher just give me to read? I really could not figure it out. But regardless, I decided I should read on, like boats against the current (<< see what I did there, Gatsby fans?)
As I neared the end of the book (and I mean the very end, like the last few pages end) I finally understood why my teacher had given this book to me. **thematic spoiler alert** In the end, the narrator learns that it’s good to venture far, FAR out of her comfort zone. She learns to embrace the uncomfortable and the weird and the unconventional. The end of the book was just a bombardment of life-advice:
“Don’t do what you want. Do what you don’t want. Do what you’re trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.”
“I wish the whole world would embrace what it hates. Find what you’re afraid of most and go live there.”
“To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone.”
I realized that I should follow in the main character’s revelations. My teacher knows me so well— She gave this book to the kid, the only kid of her friends, and practically her whole entire grade, who is going to college across the country (and is also scared shitless.) After reading the book, I felt a bit better about my college anxieties. Maybe “exploding” my comfort zone would be a good thing.
BUT THEN I TOOK THIS IDEA TO A WHOLE NEW LEVEL. The other day, I was at a Japanese restaurant with a friend and on the menu, I saw:
Avocado Roll
Peanut butter & Jelly Roll
California Roll
And I did a double take:
Avocado Roll
Peanut butter & Jelly Roll
California Roll
What.
Is.
Going.
On.
^^ my actual thought process though.
With my inner zone feeling pretty comfortable at the Avocado Roll, I decided that NO, MY COMFORT ZONE WILL NOT FEEL COMFORTABLE ANYMORE.
I ordered the PB&J sushi.
Comfort
zone
exploded.
And it was actually quite good.
So to my english teacher– thank you 🙂
-Sara