What You Avoid Gets Worse
On the compounding cost of postponed confrontation
There’s a particular kind of knowing that lives in the body before it reaches the mind. A tightness in the chest when certain thoughts arise. A subtle nausea when specific topics come up in conversation. A heaviness that settles in when contemplating certain aspects of life that haven’t been examined in months or years.
This bodily knowledge is trying to communicate something: there’s a door you’ve been walking past, a room you’ve been refusing to enter, a truth you’ve been carefully constructing your days around not confronting.
Everyone has at least one of these rooms. Sometimes it’s a conversation that needs to happen but hasn’t. Sometimes it’s a relationship that’s been dying slowly for years. Sometimes it’s a health concern that’s being monitored through strategic ignorance rather than medical examination. Sometimes it’s a financial situation being managed through the sophisticated strategy of simply not looking at it.
The specific content varies, but the mechanism is universal: wha…