Zoning

Will it though? Will my comfort zone really kill me or will it prop me in front of the boob tube wrapped in a Snuggie double-fisting chicken nuggets into my face hole? Maybe it will kill me if we're playing the long game and we’re measuring cholesterol and triglycerides.  I don’t usually play the long game. I have the attention span of 6-year-old with ADD. Is that not PC? Is it not even correct anymore? Is it ADHD? You know what? I don’t care. Oh, that’s so harsh! Yeah, well I’m a cold and uncaring bitch who just spent 10 minutes arguing the merits of Hot Pockets with someone on the internet until they stopped responding. Presumably to cry. Honestly, if my comfort zone has its way, I’ll rock a pair of sweat pants and a tank top braless for two days minimum without so much as one single fuck given. Wanna know what it looks like when my comfort zone takes over?

When my comfort zone takes a hold of me I start ordering Chinese food to be delivered and tip the dude supa fat because I’ve ordered enough to feed a small village and I NEED for him to keep his mouth shut and leave quickly. When I go to answer the door, it’s clear that I haven’t been outside in a couple days. My skin is pale and my eyes are taking too long to adjust to the sun. Our exchange is taking way too long and he is making me nervous. Take my damn money and give me my Mu Shu and steamed dumplings!! The inside of my comfort zone smells like old pizza boxes and fruity pebbles. When I slow dance with my comfort zone we watch a whole series of something on Netflix, feel guilty about it, clean the house, go grocery shopping [still in sweat pants] make three different meals and feed friends then start the whole cycle over again. Oh, the shame… I never invite my friends over though; they’d see how I live - that would be crazy. On second thought…maybe my comfort zone will be my demise.

As a person recovering from addiction issues, I understand the rationale behind the image. I used to live with the thought that I would die from my disease and I was accepting of that towards the end. Early on I battled you, and her, and him, and them. It was all of you with the problem; it was never anything that I had to address. That was my comfort zone – blame. By that rationale, my comfort zone will in fact kill me. If I were to continue blaming others for my issues, my mistakes, my disease, my atrocious parking, my poor choices…I would surely die. I would meander through life a clueless fuck – the most dangerous kind. The kind of idiot that you encounter in the grocery store or gas station and think “damn, how do they make it through life?” or “they hit their head on every step on the stupid ladder on the way down, didn’t they?” That kind of comfort zone is deadly for me. The kind where I’m blameless, you’re my hostage and I’m downright dangerous.

At some point I think it would be good to sit down and really write about what it was like in my disease. Tragic, disgusting and hysterically funny. Seriously, I have had some ‘piss your pants’ funny situations happen while I was ‘out there.’ Granted, most of the pants pissing happened in blackouts, but hey; semantics.

Comfort zones look so much more like a Pottery Barn catalog for me today than when I was drinking. Back then, they looked a little bit like someone spliced a Fredericks of Hollywood catalog with a Jim Beam Commercial and threw some Carl’s Jr. in there for good measure. Note to self: remember to explain drunken packing and how I ended up with a suitcase full of lingerie and zero suitable clothing.

I’ll end with this because I just got a text from a fellow mother about how my ten-year-old is sharing inappropriate sex jokes with his peers about 69ing. Way to go kid! Comfort zones won’t kill you. What will kill you is your inability to shake yourself free of them and grow into new ones. Comfort is good. Complacency and refusal to grow is what takes out.