You’re the One Making This Heavy
You know what it is. That conversation you've been rehearsing in your head for three months but never having. The project that makes your chest tight when you think about starting it. The email sitting in your drafts folder, growing heavier with each day you leave it unsent.
Your body knows before your mind catches up. There's a particular quality of avoidance that feels different from regular procrastination — it's more like watching yourself walk around a hole in the ground, pretending it's not there while your entire route gets shaped by where you refuse to step.
We become very sophisticated about our resistance. We dress it up as "not the right time" or "waiting for clarity" or "needing more preparation". We build elaborate philosophical frameworks around why we shouldn't rush into things. We train as connoisseurs of perfect conditions that will never arrive.
But resistance isn't a wall to be knocked down or a problem to be solved. It's information. It's your psyche pointing directly at the place where you've decided you end and something else begins. It's the exact spot where you're most invested in staying who you think you are.
The invitation isn’t to become fearless — that’s another performance — it’s to get curious about what you’re protecting by staying afraid. What identity are you maintaining by not touching this thing? What story about yourself gets to stay intact as long as you keep circling?
Most of what we resist doing holds grief just beneath the surface. We're mourning the version of ourselves that gets to remain small and safe and uncomplicated. We're grieving the luxury of not knowing what we're capable of. That grief doesn’t mean stop — it just means something old in you is being asked to end.
Here's what's strange: the thing you're avoiding isn't usually as difficult as the elaborate system you've built around it. The email doesn't get longer the more you wait to write it. The conversation you've been dreading takes fifteen minutes. The project that feels impossible has a first step that takes an hour.
Your resistance has its own ecology. It feeds on distance and abstraction. It grows stronger when you think about it. In reality, it’s more like a shadow — one that only exists when you’re not looking directly at it.
So turn around the way you might approach a spooked animal — curious, present, not trying to fix or conquer anything.
What happens when you move one step closer? Not to the outcome, not to having it handled or completed or resolved, but to the actual sensation of being in proximity to this thing you've been avoiding? What happens when you let yourself feel the fear without immediately strategising your way out of it?
This isn't about forcing yourself through something or muscling past discomfort. This is about discovering that you can be afraid and still show up. You can be uncertain and still take a step. You can feel like you're about to fall apart and still send the email, have the conversation, start the thing.
The change isn't in the doing — it's in being willing to be transformed by it. It's in letting yourself discover that you're bigger than you thought, stranger than you imagined, more resilient than your protective mechanisms would have you believe.
Your resistance isn't your enemy. It’s the trembling before your next becoming. It's the guardian at the threshold, not there to keep you out but to make sure you're serious about crossing.
What you're avoiding isn't just a task or a conversation or a project. It’s the version of you that stops waiting to be more ready than this. It's the end of the story where you're too afraid to find out what happens next