Avoidance is a symptom. Not the root.
You’re not frozen because you don’t want to feel. You’re frozen because the life you’ve built depends on you not changing.
You don’t scroll to avoid silence. You scroll to stay tethered to the identity that silence threatens.
You don’t fear emotion. You fear what you’d have to walk away from if you finally listened to it.
Comfort is currency in the modern world, and the cost is your truth. We glorify certainty, call it “stability,” dress it up as wisdom. But really, it’s just a slow, elegant death.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
You know what needs to change. You’ve known for years.
But knowing isn’t your problem. Admitting is. Acting is. Risking is.
Because once you let go of the narrative you’ve wrapped your life around—the job title, the relationship, the high-functioning mask—what’s left?
Exactly. You. Raw, directionless, and temporarily freefalling.
And that terrifies you more than any “bad habit” ever could.
So you cling. To routine. To roles. To old versions of yourself that no longer fit.
You’d rather suffer in the familiar than be reborn in the unknown.
This isn’t about avoidance, but about adherence.
To the illusion.
To the structure.
To the story you’ve been too afraid to rewrite.
But here’s the thing about false lives: they don’t collapse all at once. They erode. Quietly. Until one day, you’re a stranger to your own reflection, wondering when you stopped believing in the possibility of more.
Most people don’t break free.
Not because they can’t.
Because they won’t.
— Wout
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