This was my report I submitted for an assignment I had in a class at school to "expand our comfort zone."
Once again I didn’t end up doing the comfort zone assignment
I had planned. Instead I ended up deciding to do something on the spot, because
it was out of my comfort zone. I was in the Tanner building late Thursday
night. It was about 10pm. I needed a place to sing for homework we had in university
choral. At this time of night however, the doors to the rooms were locked and I
couldn’t find anywhere private to sing. It was late and I needed to get to bed
soon. I didn’t want to have to pack up and go and try to find a place to sing
at another building. I wanted to just sing right there in the hallway of the
tanner building. But immediately I shunned the idea. There weren’t a lot of
people around, and this hallway was separated from the main part of the tanner
building by a doorway. But there had been some people who had moseyed through
the hall. I am not a professional singer by any means and didn’t feel
comfortable singing out in the open where others could hear me. Especially
since I was going to be using headphones in order to hear the recordings
better, which would make singing out loud more awkward.
But it hit me that this was something out of my comfort
zone, and that I could do this for my comfort zone assignment. So I sat down in
the hall way and started practicing singing the Haitian Noel piece. Once I
started practicing the fear of how others would perceive me went away. Well, it
didn’t go away completely. I still thought about how others might be hearing
me, but for the most part I didn’t seem to care anymore-focusing on doing my
assignment instead.
To explain why this was meaningful for me I will need to
share a little background information. I was made fun of from Elementary school
all the way to my freshman year at BYU. In Junior High I was severely bullied
by those that I hung out with. I look back now wondering why I didn’t try to
make new friends, but we were all in the same “advanced” classes and they were
the only people I knew. It was complicated because they never rejected me in
terms of not wanting to hang out with me. I hung out with them, but often
conversations turned, or jabs were made, at my expense. One time, in jest, they
picked me up and put me in a trash can. In High School the guys on my Water
Polo team constantly made fun of me. Even our JV coach treated me poorly-he was
a young guy who had graduated from high school just a few years before. And some
of the guys in my freshman dorm hall harassed me with prank calls over the
course of the year. During the calls they made fun of me.
Over the 14 years I have struggled with a number of personal
issues. About three years ago I started to experience severe depression as a
result. While meeting with a therapist, I discovered that the issues stemmed from
the “trauma” of being bullied while was growing up. I learned that throughout the
years I had suppressing the anger I had towards the people who made fun of me, and
the embarrassing experiences I had with them. Of course I never knew at the time
that I was suppressing them.
This comfort zone assignment was meaningful for
me because it gave me practice to not care about how other’s perceive me, or
what they think about me. It was while meeting with my therapist that I realized
how much I constantly think about how other’s perceive me. It is something that
I want to change, and am slowly starting to do so. But it is going to take a
long time to recover, discover my self-worth, and stop participating in
unhealthy coping patterns and behaviors.
