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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