Fear, Comfort and Courage

The Oxford dictionary defines comfort as “a state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint," so in other words, our “comfort zone” is when we feel physically and emotionally safe, it can also refer to a place where we don’t feel vulnerable and where things feel familiar.

My “comfort zone” is my bedroom, my own place where I can do, say, or think what I want - it’s my home. One of my worst fears is leaving my comfort zone, leaving my home, the place where I can be myself without the fear of people judging me. When I was 11 years old, my dad told my family we had to move because he got a job offer from another company. This was not all the news that he had to tell though, there was more. Thoughts were running through my head: Is he just moving? Am I changing schools? What was it? Then he told us… we were moving cities. I was excited for my dad for getting this offer but I thought about my friends, the school I went to, and the house I lived in. I had to leave everything behind. A million more thoughts came into my head. OH MY GOD!!!! How could we move to another city? Lethbridge? Where is that?  I ran up to my room as I needed to be in my own space with my thoughts to contemplate what was happening. I didn’t know how to feel, should I be happy or sad? I struggled a lot with this move. I had to leave my comfort zone and create a new one in whatever house we were moving into. To me, that took a lot of courage because I had to leave my comfort zone where I felt safe and had to walk into the real world. I had to start over, find a new place where I felt truly comfortable, and make new friends in this new, strange city. I feared being the new kid in school where I would be put on the spot and talked about, having to make new friends and I also had to face the struggle of fitting in while coping with the fear that I may not necessarily achieve that.

On my first day of middle school, at G.S Lakie, I stayed to myself as I didn’t want to face the struggle of making new friends when I already had my own in Calgary. After a couple days, I knew I had to get myself out there to make friends and in order for me to make new friends, I had to step out of my comfort zone and face my fear. I realized that I couldn’t stay in my comfort zone and stick to myself for the rest of my life. I had to have courage to get myself out there and create a sense of belonging for myself. I started talking to people, getting more involved in group work and many more things to get myself out there and this eventually paid off, as now I have many more friends whom I closely associate with.

-Carissa Spoulos

Here is a TedTalk video by Damon Davis, who talks about courage being contagious. A statement that he said in his speech is, “Even in the face of that fear, you do what you’ve got to do? That’s called courage. And just like fear, courage is contagious.” This statement stuck with me because when we are experiencing fear, we go straight to courage and we overcome it. When we show that we have courage, it allows other people to have courage when they are facing their own fears. Later on in the video, Damon talks about a group of people who were standing around while yelling and screaming because they had courage to stand up against the police. Damon saw this happening and it gave him courage to do the same thing, so he started yelling and screaming as well. He saw people showing courage and facing their fears which resulted in him doing the same.