Old Lesson, New Perspective

I recently had a conversation that I've known I needed to have for the past two years. As with most things like this that I put off, when I finally did the thing, it went much better than I had imagined it could. The obvious lesson in this is one that I've "learned" many times: anticipation of the things we dread is often far worse than the things themselves. Having come to this realization once again, it would be easy to come down on myself for continuing to put important things off -- why do I avoid what I know I should do when experience has shown me time and again that it's best in the long run to, in the words of Nike, just do it?

But there is another side to this lesson that I'm seeing for the first time, and this new perspective is keeping me from beating myself up too much for the two-year delay. For while it's true that fear was a big part of what kept me from engaging in this particular conversation for two years, I believe there was also something more benevolent at work in my dragging my heels. To be honest, if I had had this conversation when I first realized it needed to be had, I don't know that it would or could have gone nearly so well as it eventually did. Neither I, nor the other party involved, was in a place to have this conversation two years ago without causing more anger and hurt than necessitated it in the first place. Of course, I could be wrong about this, and perhaps I'm just finding a way to justify my dillydallying. There really is no way to know for sure, to know what would have been if . . . But I do know that in the past two years something happened in me -- or more likely, many things happened in me -- that made me both better equipped and more willing to have this particular conversation, which cannot be unrelated to how the conversation itself went.

This is an interesting thing to realize, especially given my penchant for being pretty hard core about pushing myself to confront the things that scare me. It seems that backing away is not always the same as backing down, and perhaps I need to let up in places where I would otherwise press in. I'm not sure. But I'm beginning to ponder what exactly it would look like to find a balance between confronting the challenging conversations in my life and allowing myself the time and space to be whole enough to step into the ring.