Dad's Learning Volume 29: Avoidance
It's a good skill to have for slalom, not so great for life.
When fear makes your choices for you, no security measures on earth will keep the things you dread from finding you. But if you can avoid avoidance - if you can choose to embrace experiences out of passion, enthusiasm, and a readiness to feel whatever arises - then nothing, nothing in all this dangerous world, can keep you from being safe.
Weeks In The Making
It has been hard. That was a sentence that was meant to go on for a few more words. It was meant to say “to write”.
This has been up on my screen for over a week now and the above was all I had down. I’m unsure what exactly the issue is, only that it is winning.
Was winning.
Before I go any further I have a single sentence for you I hope you take to heart. I mean this:
I hope you heal from the things you don’t talk about.
What I’m coming to understand more and more is how impactful what we do not say is on our lives. Well, what I don’t say and the impact is has on my life. On the lives of those around me.
I say plenty, don’t get me wrong, but what I say out loud is nothing but the visible portion of the iceberg. Plenty goes unsaid.
I live in darkness so the light I can find I hold onto. I try to hold onto. Success here isn’t so much the possession of the light as it is what is done when the light is around.
I try my best to share that light. Specifically with the people I love and, to a lesser extent, with everyone else through writing. Though the writing has proven itself to be more of a memory of the light, as is the case with old glowsticks or forgotten about glow-in-the-dark stickers on the ceiling.
They’re good reminders of what was had but they don’t light the way unless used properly, in advance, and are well planned out. That faded glow can be quite useful in the pitch black to show you the general path if lined up along said path.
But avoidance. That’s the topic at hand and the source of my issues.
Avoidance is the refusal to crack those glowsticks at all. It’s holding back, a hoarding of energy, of words, of truth, because some part of you is convinced that breaking it open will hurt more than staying in the dark. It’s self-protection disguised as strategy.
Or rather, it’s self-destruction by overloaded potential energy disguised as self-protection disguised as strategy all wrapped up in self-deception easily identified if one would just look in a mirror.
What I’ve learned, with the sting of it still fresh , is that avoidance does not keep the darkness at bay. It feeds it. Slowly and silently. It’s the mold growing behind a wall you never inspect. By the time you finally look, it’s no longer a minor problem; it’s structural.
When I avoided conversations, when I avoided choices, when I avoided my own pain, i wasn’t doing nothing. I was building a scaffolding of silence. A labyrinth of delay. And that construction eventually became its own prison. It became a place where light could no longer reach easily, and where the echoes of my own unspoken thoughts grew louder than any truth I could muster.
It made truth feel distant. Unreachable. Impossible.
I learned that avoidance isn’t rest. It’s deferral. And deferral, when repeated, becomes debt. Emotional debt. Relational debt. Spiritual debt. You pay interest on it every day in anxiety, resentment, or shame.
I would say I wish someone had told me that earlier, but I’ve heard it many times. I was JUST about to write “I wish someone had told me earlier.” But that’s avoidance in and of itself. It’s blame shifting. I did this to myself. I knew the rules and I ignored them anyways.
Maybe the only way to truly know this is to live through it and to lose a few things in order to realize that avoidance isn’t neutral.
But there’s a strange mercy in all of this too. Because the moment you name what you’ve been avoiding, the moment you speak even a fraction of it aloud, it’s like cracking the glowstick. Yes, it snaps. Yes, it releases something. But then, for the first time in a long time, you have light again.
And maybe, just maybe, that light is enough to take one step forward.
I don’t think I understood what I was doing. I thought I was buying time. I thought I was being patient. I thought I was avoiding conflict, preserving peace, waiting for the “right” moment to say the thing, do the thing, be the man.
But that’s not what I was doing.
I was hiding.
I was hoping that if I didn’t speak the truth, the truth would change. I wanted time to fix it for me. I wanted time to make it all feel less sharp, less risky, less like it might blow everything up. I wanted to believe that if I just waited long enough, the hard thing would somehow become easy. Or maybe even unnecessary.
But time doesn’t do that. Silence doesn’t heal things. And fear doesn’t disappear just because you don't name it.
Avoidance became the fuse to the dynamite in my hands. Time became the initiate.
I avoided conversations I needed to have. I avoided showing people how much I was really hurting and how out of control I felt inside. How close I was, sometimes, to breaking under the weight of things I couldn’t even name.
I felt like I was marching towards my own death at times.
And you know what that avoidance gave me?
Distance. Disconnection. A slow erosion of trust. An erosion both in others, and in myself. The people I love most started to drift. It wasn’t that they didn’t care, I gave them nothing to hold onto. I wasn’t saying anything. I wasn’t showing up fully. I wasn’t letting them see me.
And worst of all, I started to believe I couldn’t be seen. That if they knew the full picture of how often I failed, how afraid I was, how much of my life was being propped up by duct tape and distraction they’d walk away. That they should.
That’s what avoidance does. It doesn’t just keep the world at bay. It keeps you from yourself.
Because when you look in the mirror and know… and I mean really know… that there are conversations you owe, decisions you’re dodging, responsibilities you’re abandoning… it breaks something. Slowly, subtly. It fractures your ability to see yourself as whole.
And that’s where I found myself.
Ashamed.
Lonely.
And more afraid of telling the truth than I was of living in a lie.
But I didn’t stay there.
The pain of avoidance finally outgrew the pain of confrontation.
And that's the trade. That’s always the trade.
There comes a point where the silence becomes unbearable. A point where your own excuses start to sound hollow, even to yourself. Where the cost of keeping everything inside is no longer emotional and rockets into the existential.
That’s when I started speaking. Not eloquently. Not confidently. Just honestly.
It took prodding on the part of the people I love to get it out of me. Don’t read this and think I resolved to become strong and just did the thing.
Nope. I had resolved to lose.
Which is dumb.
They are not. They knew something was up.
The first thing I said wasn’t profound. It was something like, “I’m sorry I didn’t say this sooner.”
And I wept when I was alone. I wept because I knew that the people I loved deserved better. That I deserved better.
And I wept because the words still came despite isolating myself yet again. Words they didn’t hear. Because the bridge, though cracked, hadn’t yet collapsed.
There’s still time, you know. For repair. For reconciliation. For realignment.
It starts small. You tell the truth a little more than you did yesterday.
You show your face, even the part you think makes you unlovable.
You stop waiting for the “right moment,” and you start making this moment the one where you step into the light, just far enough for someone else to see you.
Not the cleaned-up version.
Not the story you rehearsed in your head.
You.
And that is where avoidance begins to die.
Not in the clarity. Not in the perfect words.
But in the courage to let yourself be seen while you’re still broken.
That’s where healing starts.
And once it starts, even if it’s messy, even if it’s slow, you realize something that changes everything:
You weren’t protecting yourself by avoiding.
You were burying yourself.
But now, finally, you’re digging out.
Please understand that while I may have put “you” in statements above, I was talking to myself. Or, rather, I was talking to myself as well as anyone who may needs hear or read this.
So I’ll say again:
I hope you heal from the things you don’t talk about.
It’s a tough world already.
Talk to someone about it. They live in it, too.
Perhaps you’ll find you’re not alone in your secrets and your failings.
Hell, if nothing else, reach out to me. I will at least listen.
To end this, I want to apologize to
. She had reached out to me with an offer of assistance and I allowed my descent into hopelessness to keep me from fulfilling my end.That’s a very un-Dad-like thing to do.
Found value in these words? Want to dive deeper into the raw, unfiltered truths of life as seen through a father's eyes?
🌟 Join the "Dad Explains" family today! Don’t Forget to share!🌟
Subscribe for free to get full access to our heartfelt, gritty, and honest explorations of life's ups and downs. Every subscription, free or paid, is a cherished support in our journey. For those who choose to contribute, know that your paid subscriptions play a vital role in keeping the quality high, helping cover costs for essential tools like Adobe and other editing software.
But more than that, your support keeps the spirit of "Dad Explains" alive and thriving, ensuring that every story, every lesson, and every piece of dad wisdom reaches you in its most authentic and polished form.
Got questions or thoughts to share? Feel free to drop a comment below or send me an email at dad@dadexplains.life. Your insights, stories, and questions are what make this community a rich tapestry of shared experiences and wisdom. Let's keep the conversation going!
Subscribe today and be a part of a community where every voice matters, every story counts, and every fatherly piece of advice is a step towards understanding the complexities of life.
Got a question or message for "Hey Dad"? Submit it anonymously!
I understand the importance of privacy and want to make it easy for you to reach out. You can submit your questions or messages completely anonymously using this form. Just click the link below. I look forward to hearing from you!
Submit Your Anonymous Message Here
Avoidance is fear based. It keeps you from facing what you ought to and learning the lesson you should. It creates a sort of procrastination from where you should be. Definitely a good dad tip for us to remember!
Pausing to comment: your efforts in this space matter. I’m a dad with no free time and I take time to read many of your posts because it’s worth my time. Solid and relatable advice across board, and timely reminders as well. Thank you for persevering.