Chapter 1: What conversation have I been avoiding?
So there's a conversation that I need to have with someone I love. I have known this for a while, longer than I'd like to admit, honestly. I know the general shape of what I want to say. I know this person well enough to make some reasonable predictions about how it might go.
And I have thought about it in the car at two in the morning, in the middle of other conversations that are not the one I actually need to be having, and yet. I keep not having it. There's something almost impressive about the architecture of avoidance a reasonably intelligent person can construct. The timing is never quite right. There's always something just more pressing.
The relationship is in a good place right now. And why would I introduce turbulence? I mean, I've probably built this up in my head and the actual conversation would be Fine. Maybe I'm being oversensitive. Maybe I've already processed this enough that saying it out loud isn't really necessary anymore. These are not things I believe. These are things I tell myself.
And I wonder if you have one of these, a conversation that exists fully formed somewhere in your interior life that you have rehearsed in some form that some honest part of you knows is overdue, not an argument, not a confrontation, just a true thing that needs to be said to someone who probably suspects in any way and hasn't heard it in your actual voice because you don't Haven't said it.
So today, we're going to go there. I'm going to talk about why we do this, what it actually costs us, and maybe and hopefully most usefully, what happens when we finally don't. So excited to share this exploration with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.
Good Life Project
So I want to start with a story. It's a little embarrassing in the specific way that only true stories about your own behavior can be embarrassing. So lean in a little. I had a friend, someone I'd been close to for over a decade. Yeah.
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Chapter 2: How does avoidance manifest in difficult conversations?
And somewhere, I don't know, maybe a decade in, something shifted, not dramatically. There was no falling out, no event, no moment I could point to. It was more like the friendship just very slowly began to operate on a different frequency. He was going through significant changes in his own life. His priorities were reconfiguring in ways that just made total sense for him.
And I had my own version of that. And in that drift, something happened that I never quite addressed. A thing was said in passing at a moment when he probably didn't even register it as significant, but I registered it and I held on to it. Not in an angry way. I'm not someone who actually carries grudges particularly well. They're just kind of too heavy, but in a quiet way.
A way that created just enough distance that I stopped being fully myself in his presence. You know, I started managing the friendship a little, curating it and showing up as a slightly edited version of the Jonathan that didn't include the part that I had felt. And I don't know, maybe overlooked. Diminished is probably too strong a word, but kind of something in that neighborhood. And
For a long time, I told myself that I wasn't saying anything because there was just nothing to say. No, we were fine. The friendship was fine. Why introduce drama into something that was, by any reasonable external measure, kind of working? And he had no idea anything was different. I was being mature. I was protecting something I valued.
That story was so clean and so available that I almost believed it. What I was actually doing, and this took me an embarrassingly long time to see clearly, was protecting myself, not the friendship, myself.
And from a discomfort of, you know, a potentially awkward conversation and from the chance that he might get defensive or not understand or that I'd say it wrong and make something that was currently fine into something that was actively broken.
I was running a very detailed simulation of all the ways it could go sideways and then using that simulation as evidence that staying quiet was just the wiser move. Which, if you've ever tried to conduct a difficult conversation entirely inside your own head, where you control all the variables and everyone says exactly what they're supposed to say, you know is not actually a conversation at all.
It's an elaborate, extremely convincing, entirely private theater production with very good special effects and a terrible third act. So eventually, you know, I got to a point where I just, I said the thing. Not because I've engineered the perfect moment. I hadn't. Not because I'd finally found the exact right words. I hadn't done that either.
I said it because enough time had passed that the distance between us had started to feel kind of permanent. And I didn't want a permanent distance from someone I actually cared a lot about. And it went differently than I had rehearsed. Not worse, just kind of more human. He heard me differently than I expected. He said something I definitely hadn't written into my version of the script.
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Chapter 3: What types of difficult conversations exist?
The content, it can follow. If there's a conversation you have been kind of living around carefully, I'm not asking you to have it tomorrow. I'm just asking you to stop pretending that you don't know that it is there. In my experience, that's enough to start. Thank you. because that's how we all come alive together.
This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers, Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Troy Young, Chris Carter, crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already, follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.