The Hard Thing, Adjusted for Inflation

I loved The Odyssey - like properly loved it, the kind of watching where you forget to check your phone. (Also, where you don't realise three hours have passed until you try to stand up and everything aches.)

Sidebar: you have to see it at the IMAX - it feels like short-changing the experience otherwise.

Getting back to my point:

One of the characters was a lesson in distraction. He kept choosing to avoid the reality of the situation waiting for him.

And I know that route. I've walked it in smaller storms.

Last week, an argument with people I love ended the way arguments sometimes do - badly, and on a WhatsApp group call. (Thank you, WhatsApp group calls - turns out I can now make a spectacle of myself in front of multiple people at once instead of one at a time.)

I got so worked up I actually hung up. Before you judge the rudeness of the action, I should say I can't remember ever having done that before.

Then I did what I usually do after I've said something I'm not proud of: I tried to fix it with more words. I messaged and explained myself.

Then I explained myself some more, in case the first version hadn't landed.

Then I read the silence as them not understanding.

Once I'd had enough time to sit with it, I (finally) figured out that I hadn't been actually trying to understand how what I'd said had landed. I was trying to be understood. Those are not the same thing, and only one would solve what had broken.

Once I saw that, the next step was obvious - addressing the impact rather than justifying the action. I've known that for a few days now, and I haven't had that conversation yet.

This time, though, I want to believe there's a real difference between not yet and not going to.

I'm choosing the words.

I'm giving them enough time to settle before I say them.

That's not the same thing as avoidance, even though from the outside (and sometimes from the inside) they can look identical.

As much as I don't like it, I have to fess up to there being a pattern here. I used to do it at work, before every performance conversation I knew would land badly. I did it before resigning from roles I'd already left in every way that mattered, long before I said so out loud.

Sidebar: I have a working theory that this is genetic. No, I haven't tested the theory. I'm avoiding that too. (Hi bro 👋, you should know exactly what I mean but likely to avoid and be in denial about it).

In the past, "giving it time" was sometimes just avoidance with my putting some supposedly intelligent narrative (read: excuse) to it.

The setting changes. The mechanism doesn't:

If the conversation is hard, and I suspect the other person won't fully 'get it', I find something else to be busy with first.

What I used to believe (what I think most of us believe, if we're honest) is that delay is neutral. That the hard conversation is simply waiting for you, unchanged, exactly where you left it, priced the same as the day you walked away from it.

It isn't.

Emotional avoidance has its own inflation rate. Every day I don't address it, it stops being only about the original decision. It's also about the silence since. I'm not paying yesterday's price anymore. I'm paying today's.

Avoidance doesn't advertise this part. It doesn't freeze the cost - it adjusts it for inflation, and adds some compound interest for good measure.

The conversation you're avoiding today is never the one you'll actually have later. By the time you have it, it's the original discomfort, plus everything the silence communicated in its absence: that you didn't think the relationship could hold the truth, that their concern didn't matter enough to address directly, that waiting felt safer than trusting them with where you actually stand.

None of that is usually true. It just becomes the story that fills the gap you left.

I don't think the answer is performing bravery I don't feel, or having the conversation before I've actually understood what needs to be said. Some things genuinely do need space before they're said well. But there's a difference between taking the time a hard conversation deserves and using time as a way of not having it at all.

That difference isn't always obvious. Avoidance and processing can feel quite similar in the moment.

Both involve waiting.

Both involve telling yourself you're not ready yet.

The difference is really whether you're doing the work of getting ready, or just getting comfortable with not being ready. Right now, I'm trying to do the first one (and watching myself closely enough to notice if "not yet" turns into "not going to," because I've gone down this road before).

The people closest to me aren't asking me to agree with them. They're asking not to be shut out of how I got somewhere. That's a smaller ask than the one I've been avoiding. The conversation in my head is always bigger than the one I actually end up having. I think that's where most of the avoiding comes from - not the hard thing itself, but the size I've built it up to be before I've even started.

I still have a conversation to have. I'm not writing this because I've had it. I'm writing it because I'm in the middle of trying to do this differently than I have before. Naming the pattern out loud, in real time, feels like part of how I keep myself honest about where I'm at and what my intentions are.

Some things deserve the time it takes to actually understand them - to see it from other perspectives, and find words that will land rather than just be said. That's not stalling. The alchemy is in giving yourself enough time to process and find the right words, but not so much time that inflation has outpaced any words that could be spoken.

...and no, before you ask, the oracle did not say 'just do it.' What she actually said was 'pick a Tuesday and stop hiding in the group chat.' Considerably less quotable, but more useful.