The Haircut
I was thirteen years old. I sat in the barber’s chair, and within sixty seconds I knew — he was going too short. Nothing like what I’d asked for. And I said nothing.
I sat there for twenty minutes and watched it happen. I left looking like someone I didn’t recognise. And I carried that haircut for six weeks.
What was I so afraid of? Making it awkward. The barber’s reaction. The small social friction of saying — actually, can you stop? That’s not what I wanted. Six words. And I couldn’t say them.
We had just moved to the UK. I was alone in a new country, away from everything familiar. Maybe that’s part of it.
But the crazy part is that this wasn’t just a thirteen-year-old thing. It carried through into my adulthood — and when it did, it mutated. The silence didn’t stay silence. What started as a boy who couldn’t speak up became a man who sometimes goes too far the other way. Either I walk away entirely, or I push until I get what I want.
The avoidance flipped into aggression. Same fear underneath. Different costume.
The quiet, daily version is still there, though. Not the dramatic kind — not the big blowups or the obvious standoffs. The kind that looks totally reasonable on the surface and is slowly, steadily costing you your life.
A few days ago, I came across this idea from writer Avaat Bookbear Express:
As a rule, the psychologically healthier someone is, the less time it takes them to do something they were eventually going to do anyway. Anything from sending a text to quitting a job.
Which means all the delay — all the circling, the procrastinating, the “I’ll deal with it later” — isn’t a strategy. It’s fear. Dressed up as a strategy.
And the fear, almost always, is the same thing: friction. Conflict. The moment when you might make someone uncomfortable, or be made uncomfortable yourself.
Just before COVID, I hired a close friend to lead a major marketing restructure at the company. He couldn’t deliver. I knew it for months before I said anything — circling, hoping, avoiding the conversation I needed to have. And when I finally did confront it, I’d waited so long that the frustration came out harder than it should have.
We hardly speak now. The irony is that the avoidance didn’t protect the friendship. It just meant that when the collision came, there was too much unsaid weight behind it.
My memoir took a long time to write.
Seven years. And I’ve had stretches—sometimes months—when I didn’t open the file. Where I told myself it was too hard to reveal so much, or the time wasn’t right, or I needed to live more of it before I could write it.
All of which contained some truth. But underneath all of it, if I’m honest, was this: I was afraid of sitting down and discovering I couldn’t solve the problems I knew were there. That the structure was broken. That I didn’t have what it takes to fix it.
The avoidance was protecting me from that confrontation. With the work. With myself.
And of course — the only way through was through. The only way to find out if I could fix it was to sit down and try. Every day I didn’t was another day I was circling the rock, pretending not to see it.
There’s a version of this at work, too.
There are conversations I’ve needed to have — with people on my team, with family, sometimes with myself — that I’ve delayed. Weeks sometimes. Because I knew they’d be uncomfortable. Because I didn’t know exactly how they’d land. Because it was easier to keep moving and hope the situation would resolve itself.
It never resolves itself.
What actually happens is that the thing grows. The unsaid thing gets heavier. The relationship quietly strains under the weight of what’s not being said. And eventually, you’re not just having a hard conversation — you’re having a hard conversation plus cleaning up everything that accumulated while you were avoiding it.
The postponement always costs more than the confrontation.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: avoidance isn’t really about the other person. It looks like consideration — I don’t want to make things awkward, I don’t want to upset them — but it’s not. It’s self-protection. You are protecting yourself from the discomfort of their reaction. Which means what looks like kindness is actually cowardice dressed in polite clothing.
Real consideration sometimes means saying the uncomfortable thing. To the barber. To the person on your team who isn’t performing. To the family member you’ve been tiptoeing around for years. To yourself, about the book you keep not writing.
Ava uses another image that I keep coming back to. The idea that most of us have ten, twelve giant rocks in our backyard — things we are terrified to move, because we’d have to see what’s underneath. So instead, we just chart a path around them. We organise our whole life around not disturbing them.
And slowly, the backyard gets smaller.
The space we have to move in — creatively, relationally, professionally — shrinks to whatever’s left after we’ve routed around all the things we refuse to face.
I’m not writing this from a place of having figured it out. I still go quiet sometimes when I should speak. I still open a new tab when I should open the manuscript. I still find reasons to postpone the call I know I need to make.
But I’m getting faster. And I think that’s the only metric that matters. Not whether you avoid — everyone avoids. But how long it takes you to turn back around and face it.
The healthier I get, the shorter the delay.
The thirteen-year-old in the barber’s chair — I don’t blame him. He was doing the only thing he knew how to do.
But I’m not thirteen anymore. And there are too many things I’ve stayed silent about for too long.
What are the rocks in your backyard you’re routing around?