Alt Text
one of these days i’m going to have to grapple with my avoidant strategies of protection, which is hard because they work really well in the short term
this is a trivial example but it’s basically always my answer to things, and it works. i think part of the reason i was so stubborn with dreary.dev and triggering myself with excessive self-exposure was a clumsy attempt to brute-force confront avoidance
i told myself that i couldn’t keep running, and eventually i couldn’t take it anymore, ran away, and things got better for me. how am i supposed to get better if it keeps working
to which it raises the obvious question to interrogate why i even care to change in the first place. it’s working, why are you so adamant on stopping?
and the answer is that i cannot keep living in anxiety and fear my whole life. there are some situations i simply can’t run away from. some things will make me uncomfortable some of the time and i have to be able to not merely temporarily and passively endure through it, but meaningfully engage
that doesn’t mean i have to make myself uncomfortable on purpose, especially in contexts that are ostensibly intended to be pleasant, but it’s also not as simple as bracketing off domains of life