Getting out of your comfort zone

I am a person of routine. In fact, I was reviewing some feedback from a personality inventory I took a while back. Here are two statements it made about me:

-You prefer to wait until you're sure of your ground before acting. This might mean after several visits to a new place, or after a few meetings with a new person, you will feel more open to risk or share trust.
-You dislike having to initiate new relationships.


And I wonder why I'm feeling so anxious and edgy about this week.

Tomorrow and Wednesday I start classes. New buildings, an unfamiliar routine and a host of new people being thrust at me correspond to make the first few class meetings a little intimidating for me. And then Friday I have a, well, uh, I guess you'd call it a "date."

Yeah, that's it. One of those dreaded beasts, a "blind date."

This is apparently a quarterly experiment for me.

We've spoken on the phone but never met in person. Why, oh why, do I volunteer for these things? They seem so fun and natural until twenty minutes later when I have time to think about it.

That brings me to another personality inventory statement:

-You tend to think before you act. As a result, the things you do will be purposeful and deliberate.


I try so hard to escape this one sometimes, to act impulsively or spontaneously (which still appears to be tediously slow compared to most). But when I do act and then think it makes me so uncomfortable. Nervous, even.

So here I am, with three out of the five evenings this week taken up by the unfamiliar and the unknown.

What a fun way to start the year :-)