Stepping out of my comfort zone?

What makes some people want to travel the world, experience different cultures, live in different countries, try as many new things as possible, while others are content where they are, living their small town life, hanging out with the friends they've always known, never asking what else there is to see in the world, never wondering what they are missing?

How did I become the former, a restless, hard-to-please person who is never satisfied with the easy, the comfortable, the familiar? I wasn't always like this, up until I was 17 or so, I was perfectly happy living the small town life, knowing every street and pretty much every other person that I met.

Does moving abroad change you? Could it be that once you start experiencing new places, mixing with different cultures, changing in every possible way, it's impossible to turn back, to become that settled down, content person again? Am I destroyed for life? Will I always be looking for the next fix, the next challenge, just like junkies look for theirs?

Comfortable scares me. I love being in a new city where I don't know anybody, where I don't know when I will get to know people, and how, and who they will be and how they will affect me. And I love it when I finally do meet these people, how different they always are and how interesting it always is to mingle with the unknown. To others this is scary, they wouldn't move someplace all alone, they are even scared of traveling alone. When it comes to traveling and moving, I'm not scared of anything. After all, everything always works out in the end, how could it not?

Comfortable doesn't only scare me in the sense that I don't like being too familiar with a city, it also scares me in the sense that I don't like things to be too good, too pretty, too well planned out. Like Sweden for example. It's clean, it's neat, it's not at all rough around the edges. There's nothing exciting about it, nothing new to to discover. And it's not really that I don't like Sweden, because in many ways I do. But I don't get any kicks from it.

Maybe next time when I'm going home after work I should not get off at my stop, and instead stay on for another couple of stations and get off in the ghetto. I'm sure I'd get some kicks there.