I couldn’t decide between the apples and cheese snack box or the olives and pita snack box. The flight home from New York was prime brunching hour and my stomach knew it. Delta Airlines presented me with a familiar predicament — make a choice and reap the benefits, or choose neither and get nothing. Now let’s add a layer. Guess which row the flight attendants stopped service at and never came back to after minor turbulence? Guess who would have to get up and out of the little seat and walk down the little aisle to the little back room to order her little snack box!? Guess who didn’t eat on a 5 hour flight!

Have you seen that Tik Tok where the girl is like, “I can only have a good time if you choose everything we do because otherwise I’m just worried you don’t like what I chose for us to do!” I’m not saying I can’t relate but I am saying that this can be hurtful by accident! I’ve been on the other end of it. Providing reeeeally thoughtful options WAS the work. And for someone not to just choose one can feel…defeating? The truth is that people-pleasing is a thinly-veiled avoidance of discomfort. I think we can challenge it!

How can I have a good time knowing the pressure I’m faced with that the good or bad time is on my shoulders? Easy! You! Don’t! I challenge myself to instead ask, can I accept the task that is being asked of me by this question and grow my teeny tiny muscles a little bit today? If I do half a push-up today, might I be 1% closer to a full one tomorrow?

And while I love comfort, because I do! Soup! Autumn! Uggs! I also want to be a person that grows from discomfort. I think it would be very tragic at the age of 27 to decide that I am just all done becoming. Imagine! Like I looked under the hood, saw all the room for improvement and adjustments and just decided yeah let’s drive her for another 20 years but make no changes and no updates! She’s good to go! WHO WOULD WANT TO RIDE WITH ME? Speaking for myself, I will be cruisin through this lil life with people who are getting those checkups and new parts as needed!

Where I really played myself on this trip was the SoHo Nike store. You see, I’m not a good shopper. That’s just the truth. I’m easily overwhelmed, quickly discouraged, and hate people waiting on me. I can’t relax my little eyeballs over the racks and hangers and pants and tops and prices if I know you are right there watching me do it! I can’t! Or maybe I can? But I sure didn’t two weeks ago in the Big Apple! Not when it would have majorly rewarded me. Not when I could have walked out with comfy trendy sneaks to strut the streets of NYC! 

The ultimate irony is that if I had endured just 15 more minutes of short-term discomfort, I would have had a week’s worth of actual physical comfort from a better shoe choice. There’s also something very sceiency that happens when we show ourselves that we can do things we don’t have a ton of confidence in. And while I can’t show it to you like I can show you the Mitochondria of the cell, I do know it is positive sciencey stuff. As in, good for the brain. So don’t take my word for challenging these thoughts. Take Science’s word. Science wants you to have a happy brain and I do too!