I have a character flaw, one I can no longer dress up as self-preservation or strength.
When relationships fracture in my life, with family, friends, business associates or the women I have loved, my instinct is to retreat. Not to repair. Not to listen. I pause people. I shut doors. I disappear from shared spaces and shared memories.
I convince myself that distance will bring clarity, that time will tell me whether someone deserves to be let back in or permanently shut out.
It is a child’s way of thinking. And I followed it for far too long.
With family, friends and colleagues, that pause often becomes silence. With romantic relationships, it becomes deletion.
Entire chapters are banished. Restaurants avoided. Roads abandoned. Familiar places become forbidden because memory is too vivid to tolerate.
Walking back into those spaces feels like stepping into a warped version of “Back to the Future,” except instead of Marty McFly, it is me standing there, surrounded by moments that once felt safe and now feel unbearable.
For years, I told myself this was how I protected my heart. That blocking, avoiding and cutting ties was maturity. That shutting down was growth. That if I didn’t look back, I wouldn’t hurt.
That was a lie I told myself countless times.
What I called boundaries was actually avoidance. What I called strength was emotional withdrawal. What I framed as protection was simply hardening my heart and walking away before I had to sit with discomfort, accountability or vulnerability.
I learned this in the most painful way possible.
Recently, I was confronted with the reality that cutting someone out does not pause life. It does not freeze the world where you left it. Life continues. News still comes. Tragedy still happens.
And when it does, you are left standing on the outside of a moment you no longer have access to.
When bad news arrives and you are no longer part of someone’s life, the distance you created does not protect you.
It crushes you.
I see now that my behavior did not just affect me. It hurt people who once broke bread with me, rode beside me, cared for me and trusted me.
It hurt mutual friends who were forced into awkward silence. It strained families already fragile. It denied others the dignity of conversation or closure.
Most painfully, it hurt people I truly loved.
There is nothing I can do to repair many of those relationships. Some fractures are too old. Many bridges collapsed quietly without notice. And one person, one of the very few I loved without reservation, is no longer here. That door is closed forever.
That truth does not just sting. It settles. It is permanent.
Looking back, I see a pattern rooted in fear and immaturity. I did not ask questions, wait to listen nor stay when things became uncomfortable.
I chose disappearance because it felt easier than emotional courage. I chose silence because it felt safer than being wrong.
I told myself I was protecting my heart when I was really shrinking it.
There is a cost to living this way. Not immediately. Loneliness does not announce itself. It creeps in slowly, after the noise fades and the shared places empty out.
It arrives when grief shows up and there is no one left who remembers the same moments the way you do.
I cannot undo the damage. I cannot reopen doors that no longer exist. But I can name the flaw honestly. I can admit that my way of coping was rooted in fear and emotional immaturity.
And I can choose, moving forward, to stay present longer, listen harder and walk away less easily.
Some lessons arrive gently.
Others arrive when the room is already empty.
This one arrived far too late.
