The Locked Door

Avoidance doesn’t protect you — it quietly shrinks your future

The pressure only builds when fear is carried instead of faced.

It is a human tendency to run from problems rather than toward them. We postpone confrontation, delay discomfort, and convince ourselves that avoidance is temporary. But every avoidance has a cost.

Locking a door behind you traps you in a labyrinth. Without a map, movement slows, direction blurs, and apathy begins to feel permanent.

Every time a new door is closed, the “safe zone” becomes smaller. The corridors narrow. The labyrinth feels endless, not because it is large, but because there are fewer ways forward.

Every locked door leaves you holding a key. One key feels harmless. Many become heavy. The weight builds quietly, until pressure replaces clarity.

Imagine moving slowly through this maze. Now imagine facing a fear you avoided. Now imagine facing several — not because you were ready, but because you delayed too long. Progress becomes forced instead of chosen.

There is a difference between closing a door to grow and closing one to run.

Opening a door will destabilize your season of growth. It will shake the identity you have just begun to recognize. I knew this. I opened it anyway.

The door did not confirm who I was becoming. It stripped away who I could no longer pretend to be. A version of myself built on containment and control did not survive that moment.

Not opening the door was no longer neutral. It meant allowing growth to accumulate without coherence — building an identity with no internal structure, one destined to collapse under its own weight.

Opening the door did not remove fear. It removed the illusion that fear was protecting me.

Some fears dissolve when faced. Others remain — but they lose authority. What changes is not the fear, but the self that stands before it.

With each door opened, the safe zone expands, not because the world becomes smaller, but because avoidance loses its grip. The labyrinth reveals itself for what it always was: a structure built by postponement.

Once a door is opened, it cannot be locked again in the same way. Even if fear returns, the knowledge remains. The season shifts. The self that belonged to the closed corridors no longer fits.

The labyrinth was never eternal.

It only felt that way while I was still running.

And freedom did not arrive as relief —

it arrived as coherence.