I was sitting in the salon getting my hair braided, casually watching Emily in Paris in between checking my phone and texting my friends, when one of the characters said something relatively profound to Emily about her avoidance of an affair between her client and her boss, “You can never escape life. Never.”

And I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Mainly because I was in an African braiding salon. A place where you can usually find a Nigerian telenovela on the tv on one wall and the latest Tyler Perry flick on the other.

Yet and still…Emily in Paris it was.

I wasn’t searching for anything. I wasn’t looking for some great lesson. I was merely existing, in my body, in community, half-present to a show I’d already seen twice (judge ya momma). And still, somehow the truth found me anyway.

That’s the thing about life. It doesn’t wait for you to be ready.

It’s coming at you, whether you expect it or not.

Here’s a little more truth: We are not living our lives. We are managing our feelings about our lives, and the escape that often follows those feelings.

The problem is the scrolling, the busyness, the “I’ll deal with it later” doesn’t feel quite like escape. It just feels like Tuesday.

But those mindless Tuesdays often lead to the version of yourself you keep postponing, the conversation you keep not having, and the decision that keeps getting buried under everything urgent and comfortable and safe. So you do what any red blooded human would do and tell yourself you’re just waiting for the right time, the right circumstances, the right amount of energy.

But the right time has a way of never quite arriving, does it. That’s because the right time requires you to actually stop running, when running has become your default.

Think about how you move through a day. There is always something to respond to, something to handle, something that needs your attention before you can get to the thing that actually matters. And by the time you’ve handled all of it, you’re too tired to do anything that requires real courage or real honesty.

So you table it. Again. And every single time it feels like you’re doing the reasonable thing, because life is genuinely demanding and the exhaustion is real.

This reminds of a Chris Rock joke about parked cars with spinning rims, where he says, “It looks like they’re moving, but they ain’t going nowhere.” Before shouting, “they spinnin n*gga, they spinnin.”

Hello, You.

You see, escape is efficient. It works. It keeps the discomfort at a distance just long enough to make it through the week, and then the next one, and then somehow years have passed and the thing that needed to change is still sitting there, patient as ever, waiting. We’ve gotten very good at making the status quo survivable, haven’t we.

We pay the bills, we show up, we keep it moving. Here’s the thing, survivable is comfortable enough to stay in indefinitely, because it doesn’t demand anything.

It just costs everything…slowly.

Life doesn’t disappear because you stopped looking at it. It accumulates.

What version of your life are you only living in your head, in the someday, in the when-things-finally-settle? Because I know there is a vision of yourself that you return to, in the moments between everything else. I see it for myself often. In fact, I experienced just last night, while backstage/on the stage during a George Clinton concert.

I felt the electricity of the crowd, I saw myself at the mic, like I have so many times before, and I questioned if it should be up there. I have this sliding door/parallel universe moment often, where I can see myself speaking in front of large audiences, but when the moment passes I retreat back to the comforts of my very cushy couch and the very laptop I’m writing this newsletter on.

Because this version of life feels safer. I know what avoidance is costing me. What is it costing you?

Is it a business you keep researching but never launching. A hard conversation with someone you love that you keep rehearsing but never having. A body you keep promising to take care of after this project, after this season, after things slow down.

But every time life gets loud or uncomfortable, that vision gets filed away again under eventually.

Avoidance is seductive though, because the cost isn’t something that hits you all at once and it allows to dream big while continuing to play small. There’s no single moment where everything falls apart. It’s a slow tax, paid in missed opportunities, stalled growth, and a persistent low-grade feeling that your real life is somewhere just ahead of you, always about to begin…but never really quite there.

You can feel it in the way you talk about your goals in future tense, always. In the way a new idea gets you excited and then dies without you ever saying out loud that you gave up on it. In the way you look up and realize another year passed and you’re still in the same place, having the same internal debate.

The longer you pay that tax, the more normal it starts to feel. And normal is the most dangerous place to be when you’re meant for more.

Our hearts rarely crack open from the right book or the perfect conversation. We crack open from stillness. The salon did that for me. The braiding, the show playing in the background, the easy rhythm of an afternoon with nowhere urgent to be, created just enough quiet for something very real to land.

But you don’t need an afternoon at a salon with some random show on in the background. You already know what needs to change. As with most newsletters I write, I’m not really telling you anything new. Most of you have lived long lives, longer than me. I’m simply spending a few hours a week writing a blog to remind you of truth you already know.

You’re welcome.

So no, it’s not a lack of information keeping you stuck. You’ve read the books, listened to the podcasts, had the conversations, watched my Youtube videos (hopefully), and tuned into the these weekly reset life reminders.

The knowing has never been the missing piece. Stillness is. And unfortunately we’ve become a society where we fill every spare moment before it has the chance to become one. The phone comes out at the first sign of quiet because the thoughts that come up in the silence are the ones we’re not quite ready to face yet.

But they’re also the ones that matter most.

Here’s the deal, life is going to keep moving regardless of whether you’re paying attention to it. The version of you that you keep promising yourself is not waiting in some future season when everything is finally aligned. It’s here, right now, underneath all the noise.

And since you can never escape life, you might as well start living it.

I mean, what do you have to lose. Really.

Find one moment this week and resist the urge to fill the silence. I’m talking no phone, no tv show, no podcast. Just you and whatever comes up.

Sit with the question: what am I actually avoiding right now? Let the answer come without rushing to fix it or explain it away.

Write it down, say it out loud, do whatever helps you hold it.

The awareness alone is the beginning of the shift, and the shift is what you’ve been waiting for, even when you didn’t know it.

The line that stopped me wasn’t new information. It was a reminder of something I already knew. And if you’re honest with yourself, it probably is for you too.

Whatever you’ve been postponing, whatever version of yourself you keep promising to step into once things settle down, life is asking you to stop waiting. The reset you keep putting off is already in motion. The only question left is whether you’re going to lead it or let it lead you.

But you already know the answer, don’t you.

Of course you do.

— Donteacia 💛

P.S. I’m halfway through my new Reinvention Reset on Youtube, check it out and subscribe for the rest of the series.

P.P.S. I have a few more series already planned (Health Reset, Environment Reset, Relationship Reset, Financial Reset). I’m taking y’all on a complete reset journey on the tube. I hope you decide to join me.