AVOIDANCE

A monthly reflection on mortality and what we assume we have

This is part of an ongoing monthly series where I choose a single word and follow it. Not as a “topic.” More like a lens. A way to notice how something keeps showing up in conversations about mortality, in these anonymous calls, and in my own life.

If you missed last month’s post on Time, you can find it here: TIME

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Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

I’ve been avoiding my taxes…

Also the dentist. Always the dentist. I’ve learned that lesson the hard way multiple times, which somehow has not stopped me from trying again.

And I’m pretty sure I haven’t had an annual physical since I was an athlete in college. There’s a part of me that believes if I don’t schedule it, nothing can be wrong. Extremely solid logic.

There’s also that email that has been sitting in my inbox for months that I just can’t find a way to respond to. (You know who you are)

None of this is unique. Avoidance is one of the most human strategies we have. We delay. We deflect. We busy ourselves. We do literally anything else first.

And sometimes, to be fair, it works. Sometimes you really can deal with it later.

But avoidance is also a signal.

Not a moral failure. Not laziness. Not proof you’re broken.

More like a flare: something here feels too charged to touch right now.

This theme is also a reminder of where I started in this whole journey.

In a lot of ways, a few of the calls I’ve done this past month have pulled me back through the last couple years of this project and my life. Not in a nostalgic way. More like an inventory.

Because it’s easy to forget why you started something once you’re deep in it. It becomes “the thing you do.” The weekly schedule. The work.

But this didn’t start as a podcast. Or a voicemail.

It started as a refusal to keep doing what I’d been doing my entire life.

Avoiding death.

I don’t mean I never thought about it. I did. Plenty. Little flashes throughout childhood, adolescence, adulthood. Moments where the thought of it would show up, then I’d shove it down and move on.

But the biggest version of it came right before I turned 35.

For whatever reason, 35 felt like a line in the sand. It was like the mind reminding me: Okay. You’re not a kid anymore. So what now?

In my head it sounded like this:

Where do I want to live for the next stage of my life? Were my partner and I going to have kids? Did I want to keep being a photographer? What did I actually want?

And the honest answer was that I didn’t have much figured out.

A few months before my birthday, I was watching Midnight Mass. There are two long monologues in it about death that I still think about. One lands in a very materialist place. The other pulls toward something expansive and cosmic.

And while I was watching, something in me cracked open.

I had what I can only describe as an existential attack. It felt like a black hole.

Not angry. Not violent. Not morbid.

Just dark. Heavy and empty. Like everything that usually gives life shape was suddenly gone.

I’m not bringing up Midnight Mass as “answers.” I’m bringing it up because I remember how my body reacted in that moment. It wasn’t intellectual. It was visceral. Like my nervous system recognized the territory before my mind could explain it.

I think it matched what my beliefs had always been. That when life ends, it’s just over. That there’s nothing. Oblivion.

And in a strange way, it felt like I was getting a small preview of what I thought that would be like. A life without meaning. A mind staring into a void.

After that, turning 35 didn’t feel like an abstract milestone anymore. It felt like a deadline I couldn’t unsee. And my first instinct was still the same one I’d always used.

Push it down. Avoid it. Don’t give it oxygen.

Because thinking about it felt like it would make it worse. Like giving it attention would feed it. Like I’d fall into that hole and not be able to climb back out.

But here’s what I learned the hard way.

Avoidance doesn’t make the fear go away.

It stores it.

And every time it comes back up, it tends to come back with more force.

That’s a big part of why I built this project.

I built this because I was done avoiding a thing that terrified me, and I realized that every time it resurfaced, the feelings were more intense than before.

So I tried a different approach.

Not certainty.

Not faith I didn’t have.

Not forcing myself to “be okay” with it.

Curiosity.

One of the clearest things I’ve learned through meditation over the last couple years is that curiosity is one of the best guides we have.

Not curiosity as entertainment. Curiosity as a way of turning toward what you’re avoiding, without judgement or turning it into a self-interrogation.

Interesting. I’m avoiding thinking or talking about death. Why?

Because avoidance is like any other feeling in our lives. It’s pointing to something. It’s a signifier.

And if death is the thing we are avoiding, that makes sense.

It’s depressing. It’s scary. It’s unknown. It’s final. It’s the one thing we can’t outsmart.

So we do what we do with anything that feels too big.

We keep it at a distance.

We do this personally, and we also do it culturally.

In many parts of the world, death used to be closer. People died at home. The process was witnessed. Grief was integrated into community life in a more visible way.

Now, death often happens in hospitals. Behind curtains. Managed by professionals. Removed from daily life.

And I’m grateful for modern medicine. I’m not arguing against it.

But I do think something has changed in the relationship.

We don’t see the process anymore, and that distance makes it easier to avoid considering what we actually believe. Or what we fear. Or what we want.

It also makes it easier to treat death like the enemy.

And again, I understand why. Of course we want more time. Of course we want to keep people here. Of course we want to fight.

But there’s a real tension in the “by all means necessary” approach.

In Die Wise, Stephen Jenkinson talks about how easily our efforts to prolong life can become efforts that prolong dying. That idea has stayed in my mind because I’ve seen it up close.

When my grandpa had surgery near the end of his life, he didn’t come out the same. And then a few weeks later, he died anyway. I still don’t know what the “right” call was. I’m not even trying to make a definitive point about that specific situation.

I’m naming the question it raised.

Sometimes we keep going because stopping feels like failure. Because death feels like losing. Because we don’t have a cultural framework for saying, “Enough.”

Sometimes avoidance shows up as relentless action.

The refusal to look directly.

There’s also a more subtle cultural version of avoidance that I’ve been thinking about lately.

The way we talk about life like it’s infinite.

Not explicitly, but in the way we move. The way we postpone. The way we keep expecting ourselves to do more.

Even our clichés flatten the truth.

“You only live once.”

It’s become a kind of motivational slogan. A justification. Sometimes even a pressure.

But if you don’t actually sit with finitude, that phrase can turn into a never-ending demand to optimize your life. To keep chasing. To squeeze everything out of every year.

We already have that pressure. We’re already being told to do more.

Without a real relationship to death, “YOLO” becomes one more way to avoid stillness. One more way to avoid asking the important questions.

What matters to me?

What am I doing with my time?

What am I postponing?

What am I pretending I’ll get to later?

This is where the cost comes in. Not monetary. Human.

The cost of avoiding death is living a life without intention.

It’s disconnection from yourself. From your family. From what you actually care about.

It’s autopilot.

And it’s regret.

There are those deathbed regrets people quote all the time, and I’m not trying to be dramatic about them. I also don’t think it’s possible to live a life with zero regret. If you look back long enough, you’ll always find something you wish you’d said differently or done differently.

But I do think the scale can change.

If you never let yourself truly consider that you’re going to die, it’s easier to live like you have forever. It’s easier to keep pushing the meaningful stuff to the side. It’s easier to let years pass in a haze of postponement.

And then one day, something happens.

A diagnosis. A loss. A birthday that lands differently. A moment in a show that hits too hard. A caller’s voice that sounds like your own thoughts.

And suddenly you’re face to face with something you’ve been avoiding for decades.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s required to think about death in order to live a good life. I’m not trying to turn this into a rule. Plenty of people live with love and purpose without making mortality a daily contemplation.

I’m just saying that for me, it has been the most clarifying guide I’ve found.

It has a sobering way of cutting through the noise.

It wakes you up to how precious this is. How strange it is that we get to be here at all. How much of our life we spend not actually being in it.

And this is also where this project stopped being only about my fear.

Because as soon as I started doing these calls, I realized how many people were carrying the same tension.

So many people have told me they’re grateful there’s a space to talk about this. That they don’t get to talk about death in their normal lives. That when they try, people change the subject or rush to make it positive or shut it down.

Which makes sense.

Avoidance is contagious.

But the other thing I’ve learned is that if the people around you can’t go there, you can go looking for the ones who can.

That’s part of what I hope this becomes. A place where people feel less alone in the thoughts they’ve been holding. A place where death isn’t treated like a bizarre obsession, but like what it is: a real part of being alive.

I’m not the only person out there doing this kind of work. But I do think there are far more people who want to talk than we assume.

Sometimes they just need a door.

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Music for the Month

When I was younger, my dad used to write me letters before track meets. They always ended with a short list of songs to listen to before my races.

I’ve been thinking about those letters a lot, so I’m bringing that tradition back in a small way.

Each month, my dad puts together a short playlist tied loosely to the theme. Listen if it feels supportive. Ignore it if it doesn’t.

Avoidance — Monthly Songs

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