Little by Little

A Very Illustrated Shelf Life

Spectrum has launched. I repeat: Spectrum has launched. Spectrum is an anthology of queer, neurodiverse short horror fiction, edited by Aquino Loayza, Freydís Moon, and Lor Gisalson. This anthology contains twenty short stories, including mine—“These Thirteen Simple Tricks Will End Your Sleep Hallucinations For Good.” You can order Spectrum at Third Estate Books or snag the Kindle edition from Amazon. What are you waiting for? You could be reading it right now!

If you have purchased Spectrum and you would like to receive a bookplate signed by yours truly, you can reply to this newsletter (or click here to email me) with your name and mailing address and I’ll get one out to you.

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Jump in the deep end. Think outside the box. Push your limits. Turn over a new leaf. Bite the bullet. Get out of your comfort zone. Why not? 

Good morning and welcome to Shelf Life wherein we are discussing why not on this fine Thursday morning.

Few things in life are as chronically uncomfortable and consistently rewarding as doing creative things. At least, this has been my experience. Maybe some of you out there don’t find learning a new skill frustrating. Or find practicing your new skill, while yielding poor and only incrementally improving results, tedious. Or experience anxiety, if not abject terror, at the prospect of sending your creative work out into the world to be judged. 

Personally, I find it uncomfortable. You could say Shelf Life is a very lengthy experiment in exposure therapy. I mean, I’m not saying that’s what Shelf Life is, necessarily, but you could say so.

Sometimes you will get advice from well-meaning people that if you want to make a change you should do it all at once: Take the polar bear plunge, or whatever. Just hold your nose and jump in. Sometimes, this works really well.

I’ve quit using a couple of terribly addictive substances this way. I used to be a cigarette smoker, for instance. I was the cigarette smokingest–person you’ve ever seen. I smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for years. My (now ex) spouse also was a smoker, though he smoked less than me, and he brought home a carton of cigarettes every couple of days. We went through them that fast. One day he came home from work with no cigarettes and a box of nicotine patches (“Nicorette”) and I was too lazy to bypass him and go to the store for cigarettes myself. That is how I quit smoking—by jumping right in at the deep end.

That said: I’ve also had some less-than-successful attempts to “turn over a new leaf” by “getting outside my comfort zone.” This is particularly true when I am trying to kickstart a habit rather than kick one. I’ll make a declaration like:

• Starting tomorrow I’m going to walk three miles a day.

• From now on, I’m writing 500 words a day.

• I’m going to read every night before bed—every single night.

And then the next thing I know—failure.

I’ve come to learn that the issue is not with starting a new habit, but with the all-or-nothing mentality I bring to the process. If you mentally commit to doing something every day, or always, or all at once, then it’s very to fail. You need only miss a day or an instance and you’re off track.

And the fact is, there’s actually nothing wrong with being inside one’s “comfort zone”—meaning the realm of experience and activity that you feel comfortable with. Instead of trying to enact a major change by vaulting over the gate and landing outside your comfort zone, why not try enacting the change from inside your comfort zone?

There’s more than one way to grow a skill or a habit. One way, the abrupt way, is to plunge into something without preparation or guidance. Let’s say you are standing in place and your comfort zone—your current status quo— is bubble around you, like this:

That’s you in your comfort zone. Let’s say you take a great leap out of the boundary of your comfort zone. You land in a new place that is not your comfort zone but over time you will build a new comfort zone around your landing place and then your comfort zone will be expanded by the size of the new bubble, minus overlap:

But there’s another way: You can, instead, expand the size of your comfort zone by pushing outward from within, rather than leaving the boundary entirely to create a new area:

This happy person in the final illustration never left their comfort zone: Instead, they expanded their comfort zone from within. 

Now let me ask you a pizza-related question. Let’s say that the original comfort zone is a 12-inch pizza and the expanded comfort zone is a 17-inch pizza and the amount of effort it takes to expand the comfort zone is the price of pizza. If a 17-inch pizza is the same price as two 12-inch pizzas, which is the better deal? 

You actually get the same amount of pizza either way. Two 12-inch pizzas comprise 226.19 square inches of food while one 17-inch pizza is 226.98 square inches so it’s essentially a wash in terms of pizza volume. What I’m saying is, if you can expend the same effort to either

1. leap outside of your comfort zone and to claim a new bubble and double the original size or 

2. push your comfort-zone boundary in a single direction from inside to increase the diameter by 40 percent

In the end, you have the same amount of comfort zone. You do not have to increase the diameter of your original comfort zone by 100 percent to double in size because pi is involved (pizza pi).

You might be thinking: Catherine, my comfort zone is not a pizza. Well, to each their own. My comfort zone definitely is pizza adjacent. It’s not called comfort food for nothing.

Anyway that mathematic interlude was mostly nonsense because a comfort zone isn’t a physical space and it can’t be measured in square inches or slices of pizza. But I’m espousing the principle that pushing the boundary of your comfort zone from within can be just as efficient as breaking out of your comfort zone—if not more efficient—in terms of starting something new.

Just as there is more than one way to expand one’s comfort zone, there is also more than one way to get discouraged. If you break out of your comfort zone to try something new in a radical way, you may fail and become discouraged. If you try to expand your comfort zone slowly from a position of comfort, you may experience discouragement if your progress is not as rapid as hoped. Both options have pros and cons.

What does it look like, then, to take something new on little by little instead of making a radical change? For instance:

• A radical approach to writing your first novel might look like NaNoWriMo, while a slower, incremental approach might look like writing a few hundred words at a time, a few days each week.

• A radical approach to exercise might look like signing up for a gym membership or a spin class, while a slower, incremental approach might look like walking around the block once a day and then gradually increasing the distance.

• A radical approach to querying agents might look like querying 10 agents each week until you’ve exhausted your list, while a slower, incremental approach might look like querying a few agents at a time, waiting for responses (or waiting out their time limit), and then moving on to a few more.

At the end of the day—as I’ve been told my personal trainers, doctors, dieticians, physical therapists, regular therapists, writing coaches, roller derby coaches,  and probably others—the best approach is the one you will actually do. The approach you will actually do is not necessarily the same from day to day or endeavor to endeavor.

When you have a lot of time, energy, or motivation, and your mental state is excellent, and work is going well, maybe you can dive into an activity like NaNoWriMo and experience success. During other seasons of your life, NaNoWriMo might look like Everest—impossibly tall and foreboding and the mile markers are made out of actual corpses.

Herewith, a brief list of things you will need to take the little-by-little approach to working toward something new outside your comfort zone.

Patience with yourself. Plunging into something new with an all-or-nothing mentality means you’ll either fail fast or see results fast. Taking  a slower approach means you’re less likely to burn out and fail but you also won’t see results as fast. Make sure, when taking this approach, that you compare your results to your own prior results and not to someone else’s success. Measure how much you are growing, not how fast.

Forgiveness for yourself. Staying in your comfort zone might mean missing a day here and there. I’ve been trying to walk the dogs around the neighborhood more. It stormed today and it’s been raining for several days straight. I have not walked the dogs. It would be easy for me to say “welp you failed at your goal of walking the dogs more” but instead I forgive myself for missing a few days and try again tomorrow. The dogs also forgive me. They hate getting their toes wet.

Perseverance. For this approach to work, you have to keep your eyes on the prize to stay motivated and maintain forward momentum. You can’t give up just because it’s taking longer to get good at something.

A plan. To paraphrase Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, if you don’t know where you’re going then any road will get you there. Even if you intend to move toward your goal incrementally and deliberately, rather than quickly and all at once, you have to know what that goal is if you want to move toward it. And to that end, you need. . . .

Success criteria. You always need success criteria. If you don’t define what success looks like, you will never know whether you have achieved it. If you don’t know whether you’ve achieved success, you won’t know when to celebrate with pizza. Without pizza, we have nothing.

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If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

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