Comfort

What is comfort? As far as I’ve been able to describe it in general terms, comfort is a feeling of neutrality or wellbeing in regards to a situation. When moving towards specifics though you soon realise that comfort is not restricted to a situation and it is not necessarily determined by how you feel but, rather, your feelings are an indicator of how comfortable you are.

For example: A man hands you a gun and tells you to shoot someone. The reason you (hopefully) would not shoot the person is because you have firm morals that tell you not to and you know it to be a bad thing and so you won’t do it. You will feel uncomfortable or negative about this situation but the reason you feel uncomfortable is because your morals disagree with the situation. Your feelings are reflecting your moral disagreement and this is uncomforting for you.

From this example we can take that morals are one deciding factor on comfort, right? Other factors I’ve found to affect comfort are obvious, expected things such as the feeling of things around you and conversations or imagery but there are some more subtle things that affect comfort such as mental outlook and health. What made me receptive to noticing these things is because, lately, I’ve been having trouble sleeping and I’ve found the entire ritual of sleep very uncomfortable and sleep to be quite distressful. The reason for this is that I realised not too long ago that I’d been having a recurring dream. It does not happen every night but it happens occasionally and it’s a dream that reflects my subconscious, I feel, or it coincidentally reflects some fears and insecurities I’ve had for quite some time now.

In this situation I’m feeling uncomfortable with sleep because it has given me bad experiences and I don’t want to undergo them once more, so fear here is a subtle factor for comfort. After this realisation I began to look out for more ‘factors’ of comfort and determined some of the aforementioned few.
For the curious among you, by the way, my dream is waking up covered in deep purple stretch marks all over my body. This is horrific, for me, because I can recall when I was younger and fatter and I wasn’t really aware of my body in the slightest…but then one day I noticed some stretch marks on my hips but didn’t think anything of it. When I got back from a two week holiday I looked at them again and they had gotten bigger, as had I, and there was a long, deep, purple mark on the lower part of my stomach. The feeling of embarrassment and shame for letting my gluttony consume me as it had will never leave me and, if I ever feel like I’ve gained weight, I still look at myself to check that I don’t have any. So it’s safe to say I have a few body issues, that’s true, but I had never considered it to be deep set enough to manifest itself as a recurring dream and it’s only when I realised it was a recurring dream that sleep began to scare me.

Relating all of my digression back to comfort, though, my discomfort with sleep will probably not go away completely until I’ve dealt with those underlying issues that are causing it. I suppose a good first step to doing that is actually admitting the problem I have: I have a recurring dream brought on by body issues. How I can deal with it after this, though, is not going to be as easy and I’m not entirely sure how I might do it. There’s only one way to do it though and that’s to try. So try, I will.

- Aiden