This is Part 3 of a series. Be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2!

My parents are both artists, and have always considered creative expression worthwhile. When I started to take writing more seriously, my mother sent me Anne Lamott’s great book on the writing process, “Bird By Bird.” It’s filled with advice to new writers on getting past some of the internal hurdles to composing honest, meaningful work. “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life,” she said. And reminds us that “you own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

“Write”, she says, “like your parents are dead.”

My mother will be aghast, I expect, to learn that I contorted that last bit of writing advice to justify buying a motorcycle.

Lamott meant that in order to relate to an audience, a writer needs to appeal to their readers on a very personal level. To cast light on the things we share in secret but that make us feel alone. Many of those things are shameful, and  imply behavior not exactly in the spirit of how our parents hoped we were raised. In order to succeed as an artist, a writer needs to leave behind concerns of what his parents might think of him.

It’s the same way with how we live our lives, and I realized a few months ago that my greatest fear in getting a motorcycle was not of dying on it (a reasonable thing to be afraid of), but of what my mother would think when I bought one in the first place (an unreasonable thing to be afraid of).

We can’t live in the shadow of others. If the spectre of disappointment or failure haunts our decision making, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to thrive. Our loved ones’ goals, after all, are for our safety and comfort, even if it’s at odds with our real well being.

Discomfort, after all is not so different from pain. It’s unpleasant and we’re conditioned to avoid it. But we’ve gone too far. Americans cling to comfort compulsively, but like pain there’s a level of discomfort that should be expected in our lives.

When an opioid dependency advances sufficiently, the physiological threshold for what is felt as pain decreases. If it progresses too far, the electrical impulses of basic neurological communication eventually register as searing pain.

The incessant pursuit of comfort is no different. And as we remove ourselves more and more from legitimately stressful and dangerous situations our comfort zone creeps closer to home until we’re forlorn over objectively menial inconveniences. To the heroin addict the pain of withdrawal is very real.

We call them first world problems, which is a funny thing to say. But we’re a society so sedated by convenience that when the guy in front of you in the grocery check out loses his shit because the store is out of cilantro, the scariest part is that to him the turmoil is real.

And like with opiate addiction, our dependency on comfort is difficult to cure. Once the baseline moves, it’s hard to replace it. The best thing you can do is to lay off the oxycodone in the first place.

Too often, we change our behavior for the wrong reasons. Out of fear of the wrong things. For fear of losing a steady paycheck despite a toxic work environment. For fear of starting a race you’re not sure you can finish. For fear of disappointing our parents to take a chance on a passion.

If it’s been too long since your heart beat fast, the best thing you can do might just be to roll on the throttle and hold on tight.