“How was your weekend?”

This innocuous question was posed years ago by a colleague, at the LGBTQ health center where I had recently started working. I replied with a brief description of the weekend spent with my husband. Then an unfamiliar discomfort set in, and I began second guessing my response. Did I have to mention my husband? Was it necessary to be so in my colleague’s face about my heterosexuality? Could my proclaiming my identity so early in our relationship be off-putting?

As a mature person who was generally comfortable in social situations and enjoyed meeting new people, I was thrown. What was going on? What had unmoored me and propelled this strange spiral of insecurity?

I quickly realized that as the sole straight therapist on staff, for the first time in my life, I was the “other”, a minority outside of the dominant culture. Yes, as a Jew in America, I am demographically a minority, but I’ve always lived in cities with large Jewish populations and my immediate circles tended to be mostly Jewish. As a straight white woman, this feeling of self-conscious cluelessness was not part of my daily experience, other than rare moments of travel in countries where I didn’t speak the language. I had the (until now) unacknowledged privilege of fitting in, of understanding and being understood by those around me. I was comfortable and I had come to expect comfort wherever I went.

That moment has stayed with me in the years since, as I have come to appreciate the gift of discomfort for those of us whose lives aren’t centered around it. Despite all that I thought I knew from reading the literature of marginalized communities, I had no inkling of what it was really like to feel alien or invisible, to question my very legitimacy, until for a split second, I was the “other”.

That experience fostered a new understanding for my friends, colleagues and clients in the LGBTQ community, who were hypervigilant (especially back in ’99) in sharing anything personal about their private lives, understanding that their very safety required constant caution about when, and with whom to disclose. I thought about the experience of generations of Black and brown Americans, whose humanity is daily diminished. I thought about the toll on one’s body and psyche of hiding who you are, making yourself small, and prioritizing the comfort of others. I reflected on the corrosive impact of never hearing your story told in history class or seeing yourself represented in popular culture. I was struck by the harm caused by knowing that the “default” American is never you.

It’s only human to avoid discomfort at all costs, to cling to the familiar and to all that makes us feel like we belong. Venturing beyond our cocoons can be disorienting, even frightening. Not speaking the language or getting cultural cues can make us feel stupid or lost. It takes courage to voluntarily relinquish expertise and to court cluelessness.

But maintaining the status quo to ensure our own comfort has steep and often devastating costs. It fuels resistance to progress, from balking at requests to add pronouns to our names, to banning the teaching of painful historical truths to our children. Avoiding discomfort forestalls the possibility of empathy and understanding of those for whom discomfort, marginalization and erasure, have been lived realities for generations. And it perpetuates historical inequities and calcifies the divisions that have plagued this nation from the start.

I continue to be grateful for that awkward exchange years ago and all that it taught me. Though it did yield glimmers of what those defined as “other” experience, I’m also clear that the gulf between my lived experience and theirs, remains. But I was reminded that true change and transformative learning occur only when your equilibrium is disrupted, and you are knocked off kilter. Only then can humility, curiosity, and authentic openness to change emerge. I learned that discomfort can be a blessing.