The Space You Keep Avoiding – and What It’s Trying to Tell You

The Avoided Space

So I have a question for you and I need you to be honest with me. Is there a space in your life that you just keep walking past? Maybe it’s a room that you don’t go into or a box you won’t open. Maybe it’s a conversation that just lives rent-free in your head, but you never actually let it leave your mouth. Yeah, that one. Because I had one too. Mine was actually in my garage and it sat there for months before I finally just pulled back the flaps. And today we’re talking about what’s inside those spaces and what they’re really trying to tell you about who you’ve become. So don’t rush past this. Let it find you because I think you already know the answer. Something just flickered in your mind. Maybe it’s a room, a name, a person, or a feeling, and you almost pushed it back down. And that’s okay. That’s actually what we’re going to talk about today.

Welcome to the School of Self-Image, where our motto is simple, elevate your self-image, elevate your life. I’m Tonya Leigh, your hostess, and I’ll guide you to become the woman who doesn’t just dream bigger. She lives bigger. Let’s dive in.

The Quiet Moment of Self-Abandonment

Now, before I tell you about opening the box, I need to tell you about closing it because that’s the part we never talk about, right? We talk about the breakthroughs and the revelations and the moment that everything changed, but we don’t talk about the quiet afternoon when we wrapped up the best parts of ourselves and put them away. And I don’t even remember the exact day, isn’t that something? You’d think packing away a piece of your own soul would be memorable, but it wasn’t dramatic, it was probably a Tuesday. I was being very practical. We were in the middle of moving and I was going through closets, the way that you do, you’re efficient, you’re practical, you’re ruthless in getting rid of things and you create your keep pile, your donate pile, your sell pile.

And then I came across some pieces. It was a silk dress from a sailing trip to Saint Barths from all those years ago. It was a blouse that I wore almost every other day, the whole summer that I spent in the South of France, the one that made me feel like I was living in a movie that I never wanted to end. It was a coat that I lived in during a fall in Paris. The kind of coat that made walking down a cobblestone street feel like a spiritual experience. And I’ll never forget, I just held each one. And instead of hanging them in the new closet, I folded them carefully, like I was tucking away someone into bed and I put them in a box and I taped it shut. And the story I told myself was I was being reasonable and it even barely registered as a lie. I told myself, “I’ll figure out where these go once we get settled.” That’s what I said. I’ll deal with it later. It’s just clothes. I don’t have room for this right now.

But here’s what I was actually doing, I was deciding without consciously deciding that the woman who wore those things belonged to a different chapter, that she was the luxurious me. She was the me who had no care in the world, and I couldn’t justify her during the season of my life because I was busy. I was busy building a business. I was busy moving, building a home. I didn’t have room for her, and so I stuffed her away. The part of me that actually felt like the most alive version of me. I didn’t know what I was doing at the time, and that’s the part that actually gets me. I didn’t dramatically renounce my former self. I just folded her up, taped the box, and I moved on. And that box sat in my garage for months.

Why We Avoid What Matters

Now, before I tell you about the afternoon I finally opened it, I want to talk about why I didn’t, why I just let it sit there for months, because I think this is the part that most of us don’t say out loud, we don’t avoid things because we’re lazy. We don’t avoid them because we forgot. We avoid them because we are so terrified of what we’ll feel when we stop avoiding. Think about it. What’s actually waiting for you on the other side of that box or that room or that conversation? It’s not the thing itself. It’s the feelings the thing will unleash within us. Maybe it’s disappointment.

Picture this, it’s a quiet Sunday morning, everyone’s still asleep. You make your coffee and you sit down at your computer and for some reason you open your bank account and you start scrolling. And you can see month after month of spending, subscriptions you forgot you had, dinners you don’t even remember eating, things that you ordered at midnight that seemed so important at the time, but then they arrived and they disappeared without a trace. And the feeling that moves through you isn’t anger, it’s not even maybe even shame exactly. It’s just the quiet devastation of realizing that you’ve been spending, but not living. That money, your money, your effort, your hours traded for dollars went somewhere you can’t even name. That’s the disappointment we don’t talk about. Not the dramatic kind, but the ordinary creeping kind, the kind that shows up on a Sunday morning and makes you set down your coffee and just, I don’t know, stare out the window for a long time.

Then there’s regret. Maybe you’re cleaning out a filing cabinet and you come across a folder you haven’t touched in years and you open it and there it is, a transcript, courses you took, credit hours you accumulated towards something, maybe a degree, a certification, and you thought that it was going to change everything and then it didn’t because life happened or money happened or someone needed you more than you needed that dream and you set it down just for a moment and somehow never picked it back up.

And so you hold this transcript and you see her. You can see the woman who was going somewhere, who had a plan, who believed with her whole heart that she was on her way. And the regret isn’t just about the degree, it’s about her. It’s about the moment you stopped believing the plan was still possible and didn’t even mark the occasion. You just quietly closed the door or the box and you told yourself it’s not meant to be. Then there’s maybe fear. This one, it’s quieter than the rest, not the dramatic catalyst, no bank statement, no transcript, just a random Tuesday when you’re washing dishes or sitting in traffic, and you do the math. You think about the thing that you’ve been saying that you’ll do someday, the trip, the business, the book. And then you count the year since you first said someday, maybe it’s 5 years, 8 years, maybe it’s 12.

And the fear that moves through you is not the loud, urgent kind. It’s the slow, cold kind. The kind that whispers, “What if someday has already passed? What if the window I’ve been saving myself for has quietly closed while I was being responsible and sensible and good?” That’s the fear that keeps the box taped shut. Not the fear of what’s inside, it’s the fear of what it confirms. That time is not infinite. That later is not guaranteed that the woman you’ve been meaning to become has been waiting so long, she may have stopped waiting altogether.

And then there’s the feeling of nostalgia. This one is sneaky because it doesn’t feel like pain at first, it actually can feel so sweet. You open a bin at the top of your closet and you find a school photo, a finger painting with your name spelled wrong in wobbly letters. You find a tiny shoe barely bigger than the palm of your hand that you cannot believe ever fit an actual human foot and you are right back there. The sticky hands, the weight of a small body falling asleep on your chest. I can get through this. I wasn’t expecting to cry, but there are those sticky hands and the weight of the small body used to feel on your chest and you can remember singing, “Goodnight moon.” And it just takes you back to all those sweet years.

But nostalgia, when we let it sit too long, starts to whisper something cruel. It will say things to you like, “That was the good part. That was when you were really alive.” The babies are grown. The summers are gone. The music doesn’t sound the same anymore and neither do you. So we don’t open boxes that hold the past because we’re afraid of discovering that that’s true, that our best days are behind us, that the life that felt most like home is a place we can’t return to.

And then that leads me to grief, which obviously I’m feeling right now. And this is the one that surprised me the most because I wasn’t grieving a person, I was grieving a version of myself. Maybe you know this feeling. You come across an old photograph, not a posed one, a candid one. Someone caught you mid-laugh at a party or you were on a beach or you’re just sitting at a kitchen table, head thrown back, completely unguarded, completely alive, and you look at her and she looks so free. Not young necessarily, not thinner or more beautiful, just free. She’s present, lit from within by something you can’t even name through the photograph.

And so you sit there trying to remember the last time you’ve felt that way, that undefended, that fully inside your own life, and you can’t. That’s grief, not for a person, not for a loss anyone else would recognize, but for a self you used to inhabit so naturally, you’d even know to be grateful for her. The woman who wore silk on a Tuesday for no reason. The woman who booked the trip before checking her calendar. The woman who didn’t need a reason to feel alive because she just was. I had let her go so gradually I didn’t even notice the moment she left.

And the box in the garage was the only proof that she’d ever existed. So opening it meant admitting I missed her. And missing her meant admitting I’d been the one who sent her away. So yeah, we don’t avoid the box because of what’s in it. We avoid it because of what it makes us feel. And most of us have spent our entire lives building very sophisticated systems for not feeling those things. We stay busy. We stay productive. We stay helpful and responsible and needed by everyone so we never have to sit long enough to hear the quiet voice that says, “Hey, you forgot someone. You forgot you.”

The Emotional Cost of Avoidance

Now, let’s talk about what it’s actually costing you because here’s the part I wish someone would’ve told me years ago, all that avoidance, it’s not free. You are paying for it every single day. You’re not just getting an invoice. Think about the energy that it takes to walk past that box, to not open that door, to keep the conversation locked inside your head. It doesn’t feel like much in the moment, right? It feels like nothing. It feels like you’re just getting on with your day, but it’s not nothing. It’s like a slow bleed. Every avoided thing takes up space in you. Not physical space, but energetic space. Mental space, the kind of space that when it’s full makes you feel exhausted for no reason. It makes you pour a second glass of wine on a Monday. Not because you’re celebrating, but because you’re managing. It makes you scroll your phone for 45 minutes instead of doing the thing that actually you wanted to do with your evening, and you can’t figure out why you’re so tired.

Your life is good on paper. Everything is fine, but you feel like you’re dragging something heavy everywhere you go and you can’t see what it is. It’s in the box. It’s in the room. It’s in the conversation. It’s every single thing you’ve taped shut and stacked neatly in the corner and told yourself that you’ll deal with it later because avoidance doesn’t just sit there quietly. It compounds like interest, except it’s working against you. You avoid the box so you feel a low hum of guilt. The guilt makes you feel tired. The tiredness makes you reach for comfort instead of growth. The comfort feels good for a minute and then it doesn’t. So you avoid the discomfort of that.

And now you’ve got two boxes, then five, then a whole garage full. And the woman standing in the middle of it all, wondering why she can’t seem to get the momentum in her life, she’s not broken, she’s not lazy, she’s not lacking discipline or motivation or a good enough planner, she’s just spending all of her energy on not looking at things. That’s what keeps her stuck, not the hard things themselves, the not doing the hard things, it’s the maintenance cost of avoidance and it’s astronomical and we never account for it.

I think about all of those months that I walked past that box. I was building my business, showing up for my community, being a good partner, a good mom, a good everything. And underneath all of it was the quiet drain, like a faucet left running in a room I wouldn’t enter. And the most exhausting thing that I did that year wasn’t any of the big visible work. It was just not opening a box.

Here’s the thing about avoidance. It’s never passive. It takes work to not look at something. Every single time I walked past that box, I felt something. Not dread exactly. It was more like recognition, like bumping into someone from a past life in the grocery store and ducking behind the cereal aisle before they see you. That kind of feeling. And listen, y’all, I am not a woman who avoids things typically. I’ve done the work. I’ve sat with the discomfort. I’ve looked at my hard truths in the face and said, “All right, let’s dance. Let’s go.” I teach this stuff for a living, but that box, that box just sat there and I just let it. Until one afternoon, it didn’t anymore.

I don’t even know what made that afternoon the one, but maybe it’s because I was just tired of the avoidance taking up energy in my life. Maybe the garage was just getting on my nerves, I don’t know. Or maybe I think the closer thing to the truth is I just missed her. I missed me. Not in a way I could articulate, but in a low persistent hum that sounds like restlessness, but it’s actually grief. So I pulled back the flaps and there it was. There was the silk, there was the color, there was the life. I picked up that blouse, the one that I wore in France and I could practically feel the salt air again. I could hear the cicadas. I could feel the warmth of a late afternoon in Provence when the light turns everything golden and the wine is cold and there’s absolutely nowhere else in the world you want to be.

The nostalgia hit me immediately, that warm, slightly aching wave of the good old days. And I stood there in my garage holding that silk blouse and something and my chest got very quiet because here’s what I was really feeling underneath it all, she’s gone. That woman, the woman who sailed to Saint Barths and wore silk in France and floated through Parisian streets in a beautiful coat, I had unconsciously decided she belonged to another chapter. I had put her in a box and then I caught myself. Wait a minute, wait just one minute, you are still that girl. She didn’t disappear. She didn’t leave me. I hadn’t lost her. I’d just gotten busy, practical, responsible. I’d let life pile on top of her one sensible decision at a time without noticing all of the ways I’d quietly abandoned her. The sailing trips became someday. The silk became impractical. The long summers in France became a beautiful memory instead of an ongoing love affair. And I stood there in my garage holding this blouse and I thought, “No. No, ma’am. She’s still here. She is still here.”

The Truth on the Other Side of the Box

And here’s what surprised me, all those feelings I’d been running from, the disappointment, the regret, the grief, they didn’t destroy me, they actually moved through me like the weather. They came, they were heavy, and then they passed. And what was left on the other side wasn’t pain, it was so much clarity. It was her. It was me. And that’s the thing nobody tells you about these feelings that you’ve been avoiding, they’re not as big as the avoidance makes them seem. The avoidance is always heavier than the feeling itself always.

So let me ask you something, what’s in your box? Maybe it holds a version of you that you decided was too much. A woman who was softer or wilder or more daring, a version of you that laughed more easily, that took up space, that hadn’t yet learned to edit herself down to be something more manageable. Can you see her? Maybe she’s the one who used to dance in the kitchen without worrying who was watching, or the one who wore the bold lipstick, the one who said yes to the trip or the adventure. The thing that made no practical sense, but made her feel electric.

And somewhere along the way, you decided she was naive. You called it growing up. You called it being realistic. You called it you having priorities. But if you’re honest and I’m asking you to be honest with me today, you miss her. A woman in my community told me something that I’ve never forgotten. She said, “Tonya, I don’t even know when I stopped being fun. I just woke up one day and realized I’d become someone who says, ‘We’ll see,’ to almost everything.” We’ll see, two words that sound so reasonable and mean absolutely nothing except I’ve stopped believing something wonderful might actually happen to me.

Here’s what I know. The things that we refuse to look at, they don’t stay in their boxes, they leak. They show up sideways in how we speak to people we love and the choices that we make when we’re tired and the low hum of dissatisfaction we can’t quite explain. And then there are the dreams, the ones you gave up on so long ago that you almost forgotten that they were ever yours. The book, the business, the move to somewhere beautiful. You wrapped them up and told yourself it just wasn’t meant to be, but some part of you, some very quiet, very persistent part of you never believed that. What if the dream isn’t dead? What if it’s just sitting in a box in your garage waiting for you to remember that you’re the one who put it there, which means you’re the one who gets to take it out.

The Invitation to Face It

So here’s what I want to leave you with today. I’m not going to ask you to open your box today, that might be a little too much and I don’t believe in forcing things, but I am going to ask you to do something small. This week, go to your space, the one that you’ve been avoiding, the drawer, the room, the conversation, the question you’ve been afraid to ask yourself, and don’t do anything just yet. Just stand there. Just look at it. Let yourself be with it for a moment without fixing or fleeing or explaining it away. That’s enough for now. That’s the first brave thing because the box doesn’t go away. Mine traveled across state lines. It sat in my garage for months. It waited. Yours will wait for you too. But at some point, the question stops being, will I open it? And it starts being, “What kind of woman do I want to be when I do?

I know what kind of woman you are, you’re the kind of woman who is brave, who still has dreams, who still has so much life to live. Mine happened to be holding a woman and a silk who still has a lot to say and a whole lot of life to live, and I, for one, am not putting her back.

So if this episode stirred something in you, send it to someone who needs to hear it. And whatever you do this week, go find your box. And if you love this conversation, be sure to subscribe to the channel so that you don’t miss each week’s episode. And don’t forget my weekly newsletter. It’s called The Edit, where I share even more of these nuggets with you. You can go to schoolofselfimage.com/edit, and I’ll see you next Wednesday. Have a beautiful week, my friends. Cheers.