In pursuit of discomfort

Lessons from the only girl who has ever done a Euro summer!!!

Jul 07, 2026

I got stuck in a Paris Metro turnstile last week. I don’t mean, like, for a half second and then it was over; I mean my entire body got stuck with my suitcases in a way that even the most skilled contortionist could not have wriggled their way out of. As I panicked about having my own personal 127 Hours at Lamarck-Caulaincort, a kind French woman came to my rescue (my very own tie dye girl, iykyk). She managed to pull my bags through, then waited with them patiently as I gesticulated at the person behind the ticket counter to please also let me in, as I had only paid to swipe my card once. In French, she told me where to go. Désolée, but Duolingo didn’t go over this specific situation with me!!! If the conversation was about a dog, cat, or horse, however—

The woman with my bags pointed to a nearby gate—a gate which I pushed when I was supposed to pull. Eventually reunited with my belongings and pride hanging on by a thread, I thanked the woman. We rode the train together one stop, when I realized I was going the wrong direction. I got off, lugged my 40 pound suitcase up and then back down stairs to the other side, only to wind up on a subway car mere feet away from very same man I had gone on an awful—and I do mean awful—date with two nights prior. Mind you, there’s no air conditioning in the Paris Metro, so I was also ~~dripping in sweat~~ glowing.

And—somehow—I’m so very très glad it all happened that way.

I tend to avoid discomfort the way Joe Rogan avoids facts or RFK Jr. avoids non-roadkill dinners—that is to say, religiously. I was officially diagnosed with OCD when I was about 23, but definitely had it my entire life. How it manifests has shifted as often as the tides, but the general preference for predictability and familiarity and, most especially, perfection, is the consistent through-line. When I planned my recent Eurotrip (and its corresponding playlist) so thoroughly on Google Docs, I suppose I thought I could beat any semblance of discomfort into submission—to the tune of ‘Now I’m In It’ by HAIM.

But then you land in Sicily and it’s 100 degrees and the Airbnb that looked so nice online is actually sketchy af and you’re crying because you’re tired and hungry and out 400 dollars and just realized you might be the only single person at this wedding? Because the situation has become uncomfortable and unpredictable and if you had just stayed at home where your thermostat works and your car is parked in a garage rather than what seems like a vaguely illegal spot none of this would be happening.

And at first, that’s how I felt. I was three hours into a three-week sojourn (partially with my mom, partially with friends, and partially alone) and contemplating if I had made a huge mistake by leaving my well-worn and practiced routine of existing-in-known-situations.

And then that night, I ate the best pizza I’ve ever had. My mom and I found a decent hotel room—the last one that was available, it turned out. I managed to communicate with a taxi service (thanks entirely to translation features on Al Gore’s internet) in order to get from my friend’s bachelorette party back to the city center.

The thing about being someone who lives with anxiety—as so many of us do—is that in our efforts to mitigate even the possibility of it, we often forget how adaptable we are. How capable. And over three weeks, 100 miles by foot in fake Birkenstocks, and roughly two thousand pastries, I remembered. Sure, “girl goes to Europe and comes back saying she’s a changed woman and also does she have a weird accent now?” is cliché as hell, but maybe that’s for a reason.

Because it turns out there’s something deeply humbling and cool about being confused, embarrassing yourself, needing help, or accidentally saying something awkward in another language. I almost found myself craving it, like RFK Jr. craves road squirrel. When I met my friends in Amsterdam towards the end of the trip, they saw it immediately: “You’re lighter,” they told me.

What if failure is freeing? What if failure isn’t actually failure at all? What if we didn’t micromanage every moment of our lives and instead just took the inherent discomfort required to truly be alive with a side of the best tomatoes you’ve ever had?

At some point on the trip—likely involving a heat-induced underboob sweat stain—I started letting go. I was happily dining alone and chatting with waiters and walking through new places while the sun was still out at 10 pm and going on a very bad date and trying a cigarette for the first time (sorry, mom and dad, but if it helps, I hated it) and getting stuck in turnstiles and biking in scarily dense traffic while trying to navigate my way to Chez Janou for chocolate mousse and pissing off Dutch cyclists by walking in the wrong place and getting an itchy heat rash that took two days to fade and holding my own driving through the windy roads of Sicily and oops scratching the rental car and swimming in the Mediterranean Sea after quite publicly tripping over a slippery series of rocks on my way in.

And it was all perfect.