You’re the One Making This Heavy | prickly oxheart
Resistance feels like fear but hides grief. This essay unpacks avoidance, procrastination, and self-protection to reveal what you're really postponing — your next becoming.
Your body knows before your mind catches up. There's a particular quality of avoidance that feels different from regular procrastination — it's more like watching yourself walk around a hole in the ground, pretending it's not there while your entire route gets shaped by where you refuse to step.
resistance isn't a wall to be knocked down or a problem to be solved. It's information. It's your psyche pointing directly at the place where you've decided you end and something else begins. It's the exact spot where you're most invested in staying who you think you are.
The invitation isn’t to become fearless — that’s another performance — it’s to get curious about what you’re protecting by staying afraid. What identity are you maintaining by not touching this thing? What story about yourself gets to stay intact as long as you keep circling?
Most of what we resist doing holds grief just beneath the surface. We're mourning the version of ourselves that gets to remain small and safe and uncomplicated. We're grieving the luxury of not knowing what we're capable of. That grief doesn’t mean stop — it just means something old in you is being asked to end
the thing you're avoiding isn't usually as difficult as the elaborate system you've built around it. The email doesn't get longer the more you wait to write it. The conversation you've been dreading takes fifteen minutes. The project that feels impossible has a first step that takes an hour.
Your resistance has its own ecology. It feeds on distance and abstraction. It grows stronger when you think about it. In reality, it’s more like a shadow — one that only exists when you’re not looking directly at it.
turn around the way you might approach a spooked animal — curious, present, not trying to fix or conquer anything.
This is about discovering that you can be afraid and still show up. You can be uncertain and still take a step. You can feel like you're about to fall apart and still send the email, have the conversation, start the thing.
The change isn't in the doing — it's in being willing to be transformed by it. It's in letting yourself discover that you're bigger than you thought, stranger than you imagined, more resilient than your protective mechanisms would have you believe
It’s the trembling before your next becoming.
What you're avoiding isn't just a task or a conversation or a project. It’s the version of you that stops waiting to be more ready than this. It's the end of the story where you're too afraid to find out what happens next
