Comfortability is an interesting thing. Naturally, we tend to gravitate towards reaching a state of comfort in our lives. Individuals will work day in and day out in order to build the resources they need to reach a care-free position. We crave this feeling desperately, and we will go to great lengths to achieve it. What we don't realize, however, is that finally reaching a position in your life where you are truly comfortable is one of the most toxic things you can do to yourself.

Everyone in this world has flaws and shortcomings. It's an unavoidable part of being human. If we were perfect from birth, then there would be no point in going through this journey we call life. By being challenged, by being pushed outside of our "comfort zone," we grow. When we stop putting ourselves in these positions, however, something terrible happens to us. Not only do we stop growing, but we actually regress.

As far as flaws go, I'm probably king. I hide this self-awareness from my friends and family, however, through a facade of feigned confidence. In all honesty, nothing terrifies me more in this world than my faults becoming apparent to others. For years, I tried to hide my own issues from the world. This state of living, however, is unsustainable. After a while, my flaws began to consume me. Since I was attempting to hide them from the world instead of actually confronting them, they only got worse. It was at this point in my life that I yearned to be uncomfortable.

I slowly began placing myself in various positions where I was challenged and stressed. Over the course of a few years, I found myself looking in the mirror and seeing someone who I genuinely liked. I began to feel confident for the first time in my life. Knowing that you are truly bettering yourself is one of the most liberating and empowering feelings you can experience. This process continued on; every day I saw improvement in who I was as a person. Then I got comfortable.

I finally reached a state where I felt satisfied with the progress I made. Instead of focusing on what more I could do, I lingered on what I had already done. I began to settle into a routine of comfortability. This was one of the biggest mistakes I have ever made in my life. The flaws that I had convinced myself were gone began to come back, except this time they were more powerful than I had ever experienced. At least in the past, my confidence was feigned. Now my confidence was coming from a place of delusion. I truly believed that my faults had been dealt with. Since I felt comfortable with my life, I saw no need to continue working on myself.

Personal faults are like parasites. When you ignore them, they feed off of you until they begin to define you. You start to become your negatives, and the scariest part is that everyone else sees it but you. Because of how comfortable I had let myself become, I found myself pushing those who had once cared about me farther and farther away. When people confronted me on this, I would lash out. How could I be in the wrong if I had worked on myself so intensively for so long?

This continued until one day I really looked at myself in the mirror. Not a quick glance, but an in-depth analysis of if I actually liked the person I saw in front of me. The answer was no. I saw someone who was even worse than whom I had seen years earlier, because this person had fooled himself into thinking he could do no wrong. It was only when I finally felt this disgust in who I had become that I began to do something about it.

I wish I could say that this happened years ago and that now I'm a paragon of self-improvement, but that would be a lie. I still see those flaws that consumed me, but at least now I acknowledge that they're there. I may not be able to change what has happened in the past, but I do know that I can control what happens going forward. Leaving a state of comfort isn't easy. There will be bumps in the road and you will regress for brief periods of time. This is not only natural, but expected, and it's something that you will have to accept. What you can't accept, however, is comfortability. It is then, and only then, that you can finally grow into the person that you, and everyone else around you, deserves. Never be comfortable.