Avoidance in Better Clothes..

There's a quote going round at the moment. It's one of those intellectualised aphorisms you see plastered all over Facebook and Instagram, generally superimposed over bucolic scenery - a lake at sunrise, or a woman sitting by her imaginary fireside, in expensive knitwear.

You've probably seen it.

“Nobody apologizes any more. They just disappear and call it moving on. Accountability died somewhere between pride and ego.”

And then comes the line that actually does all the heavy lifting - the one people (me) generally screenshot, and save to write into our book of life quotes:

“Growth without honesty isn't growth. It's just avoidance in better clothes.”

I read it and nodded. Of course I nodded. I nodded the way you agree with a favourite celebrity, or a half-decent horoscope, or someone in a hoodie walking into a lamp-post.

Because we always recognise avoidance when somebody else is wearing it.

In other people, it is practically luminous. We can shine a searchlight on the unanswered email, the conspicuous silence, the apology that never quite arrives in apology form. We know when somebody is hiding behind pride or ego, or simply being plain manipulative. We recognise the excuses because we've heard them all before.

Our own behaviour is a bit trickier to diagnose.

It was certainly not always thus, but these days I like to think I conduct myself with polished concrete integrity towards almost everything. I try to say what I mean. I apologise when I am wrong. I have reached an age where crawling naked over broken glass to reach my side of the story has become considerably less important than a good night's sleep.

And yet here we are.

Not long ago, in the middle of one of the more difficult periods of my life, somebody I love really disappointed me. Good and proper.

I felt dropped or discarded or abandoned - or all three - at precisely the moment I thought they should have known not to just cancel me. There was an explanation, of course. There is always an explanation. They had their version of what went down and I had mine, and mine was both compelling and conclusive. Particularly to me.

So I withdrew.

Not petulantly, or in a fit of childish pique, you understand. And certainly not spitefully. I had boundaries. I had been hurt. I was disappointed. A line had been crossed. I wasn't going to allow backstage access to somebody who would behave like that.

I could explain my side of things beautifully. Every part of my argument was as sure as true North - which is what made the whole thing so useful. Because avoidance doesn't always require us to lie to ourselves. Sometimes we simply tell ourselves the truth with the inconvenient bits pushed to one side, like brussels sprouts.

The hurt begins to ferment slightly. The dough of “being dissed” starts to rise. Their abject failures and shortcomings are quietly made into a short documentary, while our own part in all this suddenly declares it's a bit camera shy.

I had done a small, precise and satisfying thing. I had surgically removed myself from the unpleasant situation and, I told myself, restored a little bit of proper order to the proceedings.

Very clever. Very righteous. And I remember feeling that distinct sense of relief, which always holds hands in the playground - not with happiness - but with being right.

Hold that word “relief”... - I'll come back for it.

Here is what the Facebook quote gets right: we have become very good at leaving. And here is what it gets wrong, or at least makes rather too tidy - it assumes that the silence itself tells us why somebody went silent.

“I didn't know what to say”. “I thought I'd leave it for a bit”. “I didn't want to make things worse”. “There didn't seem much point replying”. “I was waiting for you to contact me”...

These are not necessarily the excuses of people avoiding accountability. Sometimes they are simply true. Sometimes we really don't know what to say. Sometimes we genuinely believe that giving somebody space is more appropriate than filling it. Sometimes we wait because we are frightened of making an already difficult thing worse. Sometimes we just drop the ball and it rolls under the sofa, making it very difficult to reach.

And sometimes, this is the trouble, those very sentences are our old adversary - Avoidance, wearing better clothes.

“I didn't know what to say” can also mean I didn't want to have the uncomfortable conversation. “I thought I'd leave it for a bit” can quietly become a month. “I didn't want to make things worse” can mean I didn't want to feel worse.

“I was waiting for you to contact me” is particularly useful, because it allows two people to remain silent indefinitely, while each privately blames the other for the ensuing silence.

The maddening fact is that the same words fit both. The vocabulary of a genuine hesitation and the vocabulary of a thoughtless deflection appear, note for note, identical. And from the outside you cannot always tell which is which. More troublingly, from the inside neither can the person speaking.

Then there is the well-stocked wardrobe.

Boundaries. Closure. Protecting my peace. Needing space.

These are different because they aren't excuses. They are real things. Necessary things, sometimes. Boundaries are real. Closure matters. Sometimes protecting your peace is precisely what you should do. Sometimes people genuinely need space. Sometimes the healthiest thing a human being can do is walk away from another human being and resist every invitation to walk back.

The trouble is that avoidance knows these words too.

I think this is where we misunderstand accountability. We imagine it as a courtroom in which the truth is sought. An unequivocal determination of “ok...what actually happened”. Evidence is produced. Witnesses are called. A verdict is reached. One person was reasonable. The other was not. Unfortunately, the courtroom in my head doesn't work like that.

Sadly, I play the roles of judge and jury, prosecution and defence. It's a bit like going to court in North Korea. I provide the evidence. I know which bits to leave out. I know precisely which witnesses not to call. By the time proceedings begin, I have prepared an extremely compelling case on my own behalf.

Unsurprisingly, the verdict tends to always go my way. And I don't think I'm unusual.

We all edit. We step back. We move forward. We protect our energy. We refuse to engage. We honour what we decide we need. We remove ourselves from situations that no longer serve us.

And a big BTW here... Sometimes these are acts of enormous courage.

And sometimes we owe somebody an apology. The difficulty is knowing which.

I've stopped trusting my own answer quite as much as I once did. Instead, I've started noticing something else. The tell, for me, is that word I asked you to briefly hold.

Relief.

When I do the honest thing - hold my hand up and make the sincere apology, or say the plain sentence, make the awkward call, admit the part that does me no credit whatsoever - I don't usually feel immediate relief. I actually feel more-than-a-bit exposed. Occasionally embarrassed. Sometimes pretty small, in fact.

But after I do it, when I've got out of my own way, I feel stronger and steadier. It's a sort of Alice in Wonderland moment, after eating the cake marked “EAT ME”. I get larger, somehow. More myself. Finally right-sized.

Avoidance is different. Avoidance gives me relief straight away. The sort of relief you get from a cancelled prostate exam. The message doesn't have to be answered. The call doesn't have to be made. The conversation has been postponed indefinitely.

That specific slackening in the chest is seductive. And the entire lexicon of self-care stands ready to help me file it under something more fakely noble.

So we can assume that these two fickle feelings are kissing cousins that we confuse fairly constantly. Which is why I have become a bit suspicious of relief. Not all relief, obviously. Taking off your ski boots is relief. Finding your passport is relief. Not leaving the oven on is relief. But the sort of emotional relief that arrives suspiciously quickly after I have removed somebody from my life, refused a conversation, decided I am completely right or concluded that there is nothing more I could possibly have done?

That one deserves a second look.

Because avoidance really does have the better wardrobe. That is the whole problem. It looks like principle. It uses principle's words. The truer thing is usually smaller and does me less credit.

Accountability, when it finally comes, is almost never the grand reckoning. It is one slightly-too-honest sentence, spoken slightly-too-late.

I was hurt.I was frightened. I wanted you to understand without my having to explain.I wanted to punish you a little.I could have handled that better.

None of those sentences establishes who was right, which is perhaps why they're so difficult to say. And perhaps accountability begins even earlier than the apology. Perhaps it begins at the irritating little moment when you notice that the story you've been telling yourself has been edited rather well.

Not falsified. That's the clever bit. Edited.

And then, somewhere on the cutting-room floor of our own memory, we find the inconvenient little scene in which we didn't behave quite as magnificently as we'd remembered.

At which point we have a choice. We can put it back in, or we can call it a boundary and get on with colour-coding the sock drawer.

I know which one brings the quicker relief.

And I've told you what that means...

On Platform 13, wholeness isn’t found - it’s remembered. Because loss is loss, worthiness is universal, and no one is alone. We are all in this together.