Out Of Comfort - Lance Lee

Note: Originally written January 2022 following an interview for a feature.

Work is a safe place to build an identity. Even when your work causes a lot of anxiety. Even when your work inflates depression. Even when your work isn’t good for your health. Work is familiar. Work is safe. Work is comfortable. My work has been digital storytelling and marketing for 12 years. A career started with social media. A career fleshed out by an education. A career wearing me out already. My mental health has been begging for a change taking me out of my element. Identity is no longer safely built at work.

My career shift is in the Event and Broadcast Industries. My work is located around the heart of Seattle, Washington. My new home is across the Sound in Port Orchard. No family lives within 150 miles of me. Friends are scattered across the country. I have little community. I have little reputation. I have little idea what is happening next.

All of this is good. All of this is deliberate. All of this sometimes feels terrifying, or dramatic, or overwhelming. At least, it does to me. But good is in it all.

The leap in my career and relocation is rooted in thriving for myself instead of thriving in spite. My past life is split between Pullman, Washington and Portland, Oregon. Seattle, Washington has been a dream for a while and is happening right now.

The transition isn’t clean. The transition is never going to be clean.

One foot is in my new world and one foot is in my old world. Being present in both is a counterbalancing act. An act allowing me to step out of my comfort zone without completely losing my mind and becoming a mess in the process.

Twelve years feels less long as I get older, but that first of 12 years shaping my career was in high school near Portland. I spent my childhood in a homeschool bubble with limited access to people and the Internet. Being different was unavoidable. All of a sudden, I was given access to a public school, a cell phone, and a social network. Being different was a lot easier.

Access to a public school system with educational resources and interpersonal experiences allowed me to begin learning about myself as a person. Access to technology and a digital world through the Internet and social media allowed me to build a world that made sense to me, profited me, and sometimes made me feel good making everyone else feel good. Access defined my work, which then defined me, which then became inseparable concepts.

Access as defined by what high school offered me then gave me photography and journalism. Photography and journalism gave me access to Washington State University and the Murrow College. WSU gave me access to Pullman and it’s network of small businesses. The Murrow College gave me an education in Journalism Media Production and Marketing. Media degrees, alongside my media gigs in college, gave me a career as a freelance and part-time digital marketer across the Pacific Northwest. The career shaped by all of these things has now given me access to Seattle and the need to reset or request different access.

Access is still a component in what’s happening in my life right now, but I’ve reached the end of the journey it started a dozen years ago. The journey didn’t start with a destination, but it definitely defined one quickly.

And this is where the mental health component, and the need to preserve my health outside of my comfort zone, becomes clear and evident to me in my personal narrative.

My first panic attack happened when I was 15 years old. I was trying to be an actor. I was in the middle of mid-terms in classes I barely understood. I was training to be an athlete. I was learning how to leverage the influence of social media. I was trying to fix my family at home when I wasn’t doing all those other things. I was broken.

Or at least, I felt broken.

My entire life up until that year had been contained to learning at home, sometimes socializing at religious events, and helping raise my six younger siblings. Literally the entire world was new to me and being in a space designed to challenge the discomfort of growing up wasn’t helping. Especially when my insecurities convinced me I was behind everyone else.

To snap out of the chaos of my panic, I gave myself a short list of things to accomplish that would stop me from being broken or make the anxiety and depression worth it. The short list of accomplishments guided me through every panic attack and the minor mental breakdowns following. It guided me until this year, though, 2021, and hasn’t guided any of my current changes because I’m not broken.

My motives fueled an identity in work. An identity in work provided a rope to hold onto and walk forward along when caught in the darkness of minor mental breakdowns. Each mental breakdown happened like clockwork. Each became predictable down to the month. Each became easier to manage and less dark. My seventh season of mental health issues ended up not being so bad. It got me to Seattle. It ended the journey.

But the anxiety and depression are clinical and habitual. They’re not gone. Even with success.

And the only way I know how to manage those pains is to have access to something and leverage aspirations through that something and make myself something special in spite.

I’m actively determining what access is, what access I’ll accept, what my aspirations need to be, and how I can make myself something not in spite but make something for myself.

Identity is no longer safely built at work. My mental health is thankful for a change taking me out of my element. This new life in a new place is exciting because I’m not completely giving up what I had before. I’m in both worlds right now and deciding what makes me special and what makes me worth while and what makes me happy. I’m deciding what goes and what stays and what’s worth adding.

I’m super uncomfortable and it’s awesome.