Why You Avoid the Thing That Would Change Everything

You already know what would help.

You’ve known for a while. The conversation you keep not having. The habit you keep not starting. The step you know, deep down, would change things. You’re not confused about what it is. You just don’t do it.

And that’s its own quiet torment, because it makes you feel like you’re choosing to stay stuck. Like if you really wanted change you’d just do the obvious thing. So on top of being stuck, you feel like a fraud about it.

Let me push back on that. You’re not choosing this the way it feels like you are.

Avoidance isn’t you being weak or lazy. Avoidance is you flinching away from something that feels dangerous to a part of you that doesn’t use words. The thing that would help is also the thing that would change you, and change – even good change – reads as risk to the part of you whose whole job is to keep you where it’s familiar.

So you get right up to the door and then you find a reason not to open it. Every time. And you can’t understand why, because the reasons are never the real thing.

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Here’s the real thing. The avoidance is protection. It’s keeping you away from something it’s decided is a threat, and it’s doing that faster than you can think, so by the time your mind gets involved you’re already walking the other way.

I know this because I did it for fifteen years. I circled the thing that would actually help for over a decade. Not because I didn’t understand it. I understood it completely. I could’ve written you an essay on exactly what I needed to do.

That’s the part that matters. Understanding it never once made me do it.

Because the avoidance wasn’t in my thinking. It was in my body, in the tightening and the turning away that happened the moment I got close. You can’t reason your way through a wall that goes up before reason arrives. I tried. For years. The knowing and the doing lived in two different places, and only one of them was in charge.

What finally moved it was going to the place it actually lived. When you slow down and breathe and let your body get close to the avoided thing while staying calm, the alarm on it starts to come down. The thing stops feeling like a door you can’t open and starts feeling like a step you could just take. Not through force. Through the flinch quieting enough that you can walk forward.

That’s available to you, and it doesn’t require you to suddenly become disciplined. It requires you to make the thing feel less dangerous, from the body, so that doing it stops being a fight.

If fifteen years sounds like a long time, it was. I’d rather you didn’t take that long. It really can move faster than that once you stop trying to force it from the wrong direction.

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