Silent Frustration
Every year around this time, it arrives. A document. Important — at least officially. And every year, I find myself in a full-scale internal war over something that, when I step back and look at it clearly, isn’t actually hard.
I’m filling out forms. I have all the information I need. Nothing about this task is beyond me. And yet, somewhere between line one and the final signature, my inner monologue sounds less like a professional and more like someone being asked to walk barefoot across broken glass.
That’s the honest truth of it.
I spend a significant portion of the day talking myself through it — CBT techniques, breathing, reframing, all the good stuff. And it works, mostly. But then a quieter voice shows up. A more convicting one.
There are people today who would trade places with me in a heartbeat — not because they want to fill out my forms, but because they’d give anything to escape whatever they’re actually facing.
That thought lands differently.
What I’m experiencing isn’t unique to me or to forms. It’s a very human phenomenon: we often suffer most intensely not in proportion to the actual weight of a task, but in proportion to how much we resist it. The discomfort isn’t in the doing — it’s in the resistance to the doing.
Psychologists call this experiential avoidance. We build the task up, assign it meaning it doesn’t deserve, and exhaust ourselves emotionally before we’ve typed a single word. The task stays the same size. Our reaction to it grows.
The lesson I keep returning to isn’t “just be grateful” — though perspective matters. It’s simpler than that: the thing we’re dreading rarely matches the thing we actually encounter. The suffering lives in the anticipation, the resistance, and the story we tell ourselves about it.
So I finish the document. Every year. And every year, I survive it just fine.
Maybe the practice isn’t pushing through the hard things. Maybe it’s learning to notice when we’ve decided something is hard before we’ve even given it a chance
What’s a recurring task in your life that you dread far more in anticipation than it ever turns out to deserve — and what does that gap tell you about where your real resistance lives?