give me all the discomfort you've got

In the warm, waning days of my senior year of college, I - more full of hubris than was typically the case, and that's saying something - applied to deliver the student graduation speech. I drafted four preening pages and then forced my long-suffering then-girlfriend to listen to me deliver it endlessly for several days, each time changing little more than a single word or the tiniest inflection. When a good friend was selected to give the speech instead of me, I think the only thing that exceeded my disappointment was her relief that her relentless nightmare was finally over.

I've been thinking about that speech a fair bit these past few days as I zigged and zagged up and down Michigan, meandered across bucolic Wisconsin, and sped through Paul Bunyon-loving Minnesota. My thesis statement in that overly earnest, cloying, truly sweet speech was that as we wide-eyed twenty-one-year-olds entered the world, we would do well to seek out vulnerability at every turn. Naive and clueless as I surely was back then, even I recognized that this was much easier in theory than in practice. As I wrote at the time (and trust me, I know how lame it is to be the guy quoting himself...big middle school principal vibes): "vulnerability requires a departure from the warmth of certainty into the wilderness of corrosive self-doubt and lonely introspection."

Needless adjective use aside, that message has stayed at the front of my mind as I've risen tractor-laden hills and nervously accelerated past homes adorned with eight differently colored "Women for Trump" signs (they make them in neon purple??) On a trip like this, where you go six days without showering and begin to consider porta-potties luxurious when presented with the alternative, vulnerability begins to feel less aspirational and more like a necessity, a scarce commodity in high demand.

Today will mark the two-week mark of this trip - six states traversed in fourteen days - and over that time, priorities have begun to come into focus. Tracking down cheese curds wherever possible, making time for a daily walk (and a solitary, preferably lake-adjacent cigarette), finding old friends and peering briefly into their lives - these are all near the top but nothing, surprisingly, has managed to supersede one which I hardly expected: looking for discomfort wherever possible. I suppose it's all because some misfiring receptors in my brain have managed to convince me that discomfort manifests vulnerability, which in turn produces authenticity, which must somehow, at the end of a long and labored road, yield some form of growth, or, at the very least, a good story? Whatever the tortured logic, the result has been me grinning like a very cheerful idiot as I blindly nod yes to whatever stupid idea crosses my brain, smiling numbly as I circumnavigate our country like an unemployed, unwashed version of Jim Carrey in that terrible movie starring poor Zooey Deschanel.

Discomfort assumes more than one form. There is both the chasing of discomfort and the embracing of discomfort. Make no mistake - these are two entirely distinct concepts, with different levels of guilt attached and varying degrees of misery implicit. Embracing discomfort is a passive pursuit that the sooner you surrender to, the easier your life on the road becomes. Deadbolting your door when the yells from the motel room next door grow louder: embracing discomfort. Sitting on the ground for forty minutes, mindlessly plucking grass as your tent dries agonizingly slowly in the sun? Embracing discomfort. Enduring the hard-bored stares of otherwise kindly Midwesterners as you don the only mask in the dairy farm gift shop...well, that's a traditional brand of American discomfort that you kind of grow to love embracing. This version of discomfort is everpresent on a road trip, which makes it easy to grow accustomed to. When back pain never truly fades, your socks are always slightly damp, and you wake up with a strange, clotted purple rash on your thigh that you fervently hope is nothing worse than a venomless spider bite, the list of things you genuinely worry about shrinks. It's liberation in a sense, an emancipation from modern constraint, and you develop a warm gratitude for it.

Chasing discomfort, on the other hand, demands active participation as you plunge yourself into precarious, peculiar positions. Whereas embracing discomfort requires no engagement more sophisticated than resigning oneself to the reality that everything on the road is imbued with 20% more shittiness, chasing discomfort means finding yourself in situations equal parts dangerous or uncomfortable or just straight-up weird and realizing that the only person to blame for this experience you now must extricate yourself from is...yourself. Yesterday, I wandered into a 'Trump Store' in the midst of rural Minnesota, entered a dense jungle of some of the most vivid misogyny and typo-ridden t-shirts I have ever seen, simply because I thought it would make for a laugh or, barring that, some kind of expansion of the mind, a better understanding of my neighbor. Last Sunday morning, I sat in a church in Shawano, Wisconsin, praying to my new confidant Jesus that no one would notice my hawkish nose and swarthy features and denounce me for the impostor I was. Why was I in this poorly ventilated cathedral to Lutheran teachings, stumbling my way through hymns and avoiding eye contact with the family two rows in front of me, all fully dressed in Green Bay Packers apparel? I wasn't just in seek of a fun anecdote - I had seen an opportunity to venture away from that warmth of certainty I had proselytized about several years ago and had seized it, lest I emanate the fragrant aroma of fraudulence.

And what does this discomfort produce, apart from sharp inhales and the constant feeling of having gotten away with something? The short answer is that it provides a kind of honesty that delivers a trip like this that much more meaning. You plunge into experiences that make you feel like you really are seeing the country, avoiding the well-trodden path, meeting people where they are as you extricate yourself from the cocoon of familiarity. The longer answer, which I suppose isn't that long after all, is that it compels you to perceive yourself with a rare clarity. Presented with daily opportunity to explore every iteration of experience imaginable - and not allowing yourself any outs - you find joy in unexpected places, realize long-held convictions about yourself don't hold water, and develop a new comfort with and within yourself. You begin to see yourself, twenty-five years old, coming into focus.

It must be said that there is ample, ample privilege inherent within such a fetishization of discomfort. So many of these experiences I chase - or the ones that are extended to me, like the group of bike-traveling, recently retired Minnesota grandmothers who invited me to join them in town for a beer with their ice-fishing aficionado husbands - are feasible only because of my white skin and my cis male straightness, rendered possible by my able body that carries me up sand dunes or down church aisles. The police officer who warmly asks me questions about my road trip when she pulls me over for doing 50 in a 35 leaves me a bit nervous when she walks away, but hardly full of the existential panic I know that interaction would produce for so many with skin shaded darker than mine. That - a prime example of embracing discomfort - doesn't end up being much discomfort at all because, with my mashed potato-hued skin and my prep-school induced capacity for sweet talk, I negotiate my way out of it with only a warning. I have the rare permission to navigate any space I want, to enter and exit without ever seeming conspicuous, and I am very much intent on taking advantage of it. But not everyone can. Not everyone can simply choose vulnerability and expect the world around to silently facilitate.

I'm in North Dakota now, the land of bison and surging COVID-19 case numbers. With every passing day, I drive further from home, another hundred miles from a familiar bed and the friends I know best. Discomfort is discomfort anywhere but it most certainly feels heightened in states never before visited, where mountain peaks are jagged rather than curved and guns are holstered on hips. It can feel tempting to return to well-worn shores, or even to simply remain within the comfortable parameters of national parks and motel rooms and my car's gently sloping walls. But whenever that prudent impulse flares, I think about that speech I almost gave.

I was deeply, outrageously hungover the day of graduation when my friend graciously delivered his speech standing on the stage I'd spent the last month hoping I would find myself that May morning. At that moment in my life, after a week of uninterrupted, hedonistic indulgence, being hungover was the norm. It was what came naturally. Still on the periphery of intoxication, I found myself basking in a feeling of gratitude that I wasn't up there reciting a speech much less funny than it had sounded in my head, much less wise than my girlfriend, lying through her teeth, had generously assured me it was. It was easier to sit in an uncomfortable chair and bake in a friendly sun than it was to bare myself before everyone I knew and their aunts and uncles. And that feeling, fleeting as it was, made me feel a pointed sense of shame that lingered. To flee from vulnerability with a crumpled-up speech about just that in my pocket...what could be richer in hypocrisy? Had I written my speech in the dark?

I almost gave that speech (well, who knows how close I came...it's very possible I was the worst applicant out of the bunch) and I'm glad I didn't. I felt the warm embrace of sedentary comfort sitting in the audience that morning and between that and the residual peach New Amsterdam, almost threw up. That warm embrace makes me sweat. I don't like it very much. I much prefer discomfort, cold and austere as it can be, and the feeling of forward momentum it insists upon. Discomfort produces a heightened sense of, for lack of a better word, guiltlessness. Finally honest with yourself about what makes you squirm, you can push yourself to the margins and peer into what lies beyond the boundaries. Once you're well and truly wandering in the wilderness of corrosive self-doubt and lonely introspection, things begin to fall into line, one Wisconsin psalm after another.