how to stare into the sun and dive anyway

notes on chronic avoidance, attachment and the audacity to feel

Much has been made of the fact that Gen Z is kissing less, asking people out less, touching each other less. Are the kids alright? We’re having fewer relationships than previous generations. Some call it prudence and some call it progress. But I think, more than anything, it’s about fear.

We’re a generation raised inside systems of disconnection. We’ve inherited burnout and breakneck productivity, hyper-curation, algorithmic intimacy, and the slow erosion of social infrastructure. We know what ghosting is before we know what secure attachment feels like. We know how to protect ourselves, but not how to let ourselves be felt. This is not a fear of sex, or commitment, or even rejection, but fear of vulnerability, of showing someone where it hurts and not knowing what they’ll do with that knowledge.

It’s no surprise, then, that loneliness is rising like sea levels (a la The Loneliness Epidemic) - quiet, relentless, everywhere. The irony is that we long for closeness, but closeness requires contact, and contact requires risk.

And there is so much pain created from this withholding, which is not even active intentional cruelty. This is pain created from the silence, distance and the things we meant to say and never did.

Faye Webster sings it quietly, devastatingly, in Hurts Me Too: “The day that I said I loved you / You didn't say it in return / That was the day I realised / That silence is actually heard...I just don't care if it hurts / ’Cause it hurts me too.”

Paradoxically, avoidance doesn’t even prevent pain we are seeking to run away from, but rather displaces it sideways. Silence becomes its own kind of answer, a quiet violence. A shield that wounds more than it protects.

Which means: to get what we want most, we have to walk straight toward the thing that terrifies us.

There’s a line in a Bruno Major song Old Soul that loops in my head like a warning and a lullaby: I gave you control, you gave me a heart attack. It’s the reason why I never called you back.

I think that’s the reason so many people walk away before something even begins. Love exposes the nerve endings and disarms the strategies we’ve spent our lives developing to feel safe. It demands we let go of control, and maybe even of who we think we are.

Why does the thing we build to keep us safe - stoicism, apathy, detachment - slowly begin to kill off the parts of us that are still alive?

This partly makes sense. Avoidance is not weakness, but a survival strategy. We learn early on that love is risky and expressing care is exposure to being hurt.

Slavoj Žižek once said in an excellent video (recommend the full 4 minutes) we are not afraid of love itself, we are afraid of falling in love. Because falling means losing control and means surrendering our self-certainty. Love is a kind of madness, a ‘traumatic encounter with the Real’.

To love is to be transformed, but transformation burns, strips and terrifies. Everything beautiful is also terrifying, not because it might destroy us, but because we know, deep down, it will. It must. That’s the point.

As Rilke writes: For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to destroy us.

Kafka also understood this: I ran from love because I knew it would destroy me.

So did Dostoevsky: I ran into love because I needed it to destroy who I used to be.

Choose your fighter, but they’re all right. Love and fear are not opposites; they are twin flames of the same fire. Love is not the absence of fear, but the decision to move toward it anyway.

But here’s the painful truth: you can’t force someone else to look into the fire. You can’t make someone stare into the sun and so many don’t. We avoid, numb and harden. There’s a lyric from Timothy by Tennis: A hard heart will make a man blind / And a hard heart gets harder with time.

This is why love is so often met with silence, why conversations stay stuck in throats, why the swimming pool is always cold before you jump in.

In Swimming Pool by Eliza and the Delusionals, she sings: Baby, I'll be the one to just dive in / Even when the signs say ‘don’t swim’ / I’m just a girl in a rose-coloured world.

To love in a cold world is often to be dismissed as naive. But I think it's the bravest thing you can do. Parker Palmer once wrote The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed, to be seen, heard, and companioned exactly as it is.

But witnessing, true presence, is rare and costly. It requires sitting in the fire with someone else and not looking away. It requires sincerity in a world trained to wince at earnestness.

This is why cynicism thrives. Because it’s easy and it pretends to protect us. But cynicism is just spiritual cowardice dressed as cleverness. It offers critique without commitment, distance without risk. It masquerades as insight, but it’s as hollow as a cheap trick.

Maria Popova (one of my favourite bloggers of alltime!) says:

“Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lays dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite... Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of large-hearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit... This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.”

And that’s what this is, I think. A call not to perfection, but to presence, to keep your heart soft when it would be easier to shut down, to live with open hands, emotionally, socially, even tactilely, because it’s the only thing that makes us truly alive.

I hope to learn to stay, to turn towards the parts of myself that seek to run. I hope to look into the eyes of someone grieving, into the mirror when I feel unrecognisable, into the fire of something that might shatter and re-form me. We stare into the sun.

Because what’s at stake is our capacity to live fully, bravely and tenderly.

A playlist of songs related to this idea:

Threat of Joy by The Strokes

Real Boy by La Sera

Invite Me In by Wild Ones

Timothy by Tennis

Still Running by Spacey Jane

Move by Saint Motel

Swimming Pool by Eliza and the Delusionals

Love / Paranoia by Tame Impala

Hurts Me Too by Faye Webster

Secret of Life by Lord Huron

Ode to a Conversation Stuck in my Throat by Del Water Gap

Jaded by Near Tears

Below are two meditations in poem-form on these ideas I wrote in the last year about silence, avoidance, voice, and the courage to be the first to speak. To love first and to not wait for permission.

---

A Breathing Butterfly

There is a long ocean to be found in the question:

Would you be the first to love?

My dear fearless friend,

Would you believe enough in something to speak up right now, right here.

Would you shatter the silence

To dare admit a shade of yellow warmth

Amidst the present bitter nothingness we walk inside of.

I do find a sweet strength in the first,

A bold beauty in

“Well, actually…”

Would you ever dare to speak the words of your heart

That lie etched in the lost echoes of your conversations,

A butterfly lives sleeping under the weight of your waiting,

A butterfly birthed, please wake up

A bird that is scared to sing, these broken wings

Now battling to breathe without your bitter boldness

And waiting for…?

Well,

There is always nothing and then there is suddenly something.

I see a butterflying inside of you, she is looking through me

I see me, open me

Because the poets told me nothing just begins on its own, yes, we must begin by speaking

Yes, I am speaking in order to exist right here

I exist through these words, so you may attach yourself to my frequency

Come alive through our own words that transform our shared air

She says that’s the tale of how the universe began, isn’t it

We all require a first step, a firestarter to meet your set of matches

But we adapt to the comfortable cold

In the way we can adapt to anything

In order to simply exist

Trapped in its own zeroes

A death of awareness regarding this state of dangerous weather.

And today’s forecast? It’s so cold!

I notice this burn and a cold enters my movement,

Twisting to resisting, away from the way others care about

Some learn to exist under layers of jackets

Turning away from the sun in order to feel

Spinning yourself further away

From yourself

Your very own distance

A heart that exists separately to its owner

And where exactly is it left stored?

Alone.

Leaning away, this twisted heart pulls me further away

From myself

I am running towards you, and yet I am eternally far away from the centre of myself

In a cold unfiltered distance,

Stand further back!

Reach out to a painfully unreadable distance

As I try to understand the words listening to me in your eyes

My hands were not made for touching

And this lost heart is banned from becoming

And banned by who exactly?

Existing within an economy of apathy,

Structures of separation

Disconnecting me from myself, and you.

Yet, I still believe there exists a specific kind of compatibility

Synchronicity,

Evolution gave us adaptability

This bitter apathy of morality is forever killing me

But there is an alignment of our certain waves of energy

Amongst this very tender frequency.

Don’t you see?

Now first,

Would you ever choose to speak to me?

---

Sometimes, silence is violence

Alternative: Touch me, I’m sick

Please, would you steady my tender heart?

as my trembling hands desperately try to Hold onto myself, or you

Hold me

As I am so tired of working

for the silent knife, in this life

So, would you steady the gun as you raise it

Triggered by my very own unfortunate tenderness

Well, it is actually a very fortunate tenderness

Because to feel is a gift

And were your lips never taught to speak

And maybe your voice is a foreign language that you never learned

But still, oh no, darling, there she goes

Spinning, because of you and your inherited ways, to be clear

And your bitter silence, your dark origins

That was the day I learned sometimes silence is actually hurt

Your difficulty to feel the profound way in which I feel myself and I express

And it’s honestly almost hilarious the way I bet on losing dogs

You avoid dancing, it’s avoidance

For the sake of living on the knife’s edge

It is my way, and it is still quite beautiful

If only it did not hurt me

And it would actually be nice if my dogs won one time.

Dear God,

my open heart lies pulsating in these bare, young palms presented on a platter of my worn words

yes, my worn hollow and hungry heart,

twisted by this never-ending lack of tenderness

Well, the hardest thing it has been like this for years, and well, my whole life really

And it’s not even really just about you at all

My womanly hands are bloody and reforged,

Battered, bruised, I am blue and purple

again and again and again and

so could you please hold me

Because I am always softly sick to my stomach at the state of it all

Bleeding, begging for a happy ending,

and a soft, sweet friend, any

And I know I have met this old friend before,

But I remember every angel is terrifying

And it hurts to look at the sun

Especially when dressed in a bitter darkness,

So I look away, and so do you,

You look away a lot

You don’t like to look at the sun at all

Because, less you force me to confront myself, yourself, your fragile self

And the sun hurts your eyes, of course,

It hurts mine too but I still look with strong eyes

I am looking at the mirrors of your hollow dishonest eyes,

but still, I know your eyes are still true

And I am rising, this transformation burns my insides

So turn my insides out, existing inside of myself

Beside myself

Because there is a deep and dark violence in your silence

Yes, a vulnerable violence

It is actually a rather systemic sinister silence

And silence is hurt too, if only you knew

The hurt of origins

And God, your silence hurts me too

So please, allow yourself to free the fragile

Free yourself through speaking to me

Because I reach out to touch you

And cut myself on the edges of your sharp, closed jaw

Please speak, sweetly for once

Because else, you split my my sides open

Split me open right down the open

And split the seams of my soul open, of my heart

Seams of my mind and midnight dress

as the world moves on,

I speak and you do not hear me

You are turned away, gazing away,

My voice fades

And it would actually be almost funny, honey

In a way, it is still pretty hilarious to me

If it didn’t hurt so much

Because I am spinning, I am spinning

So steady me, stabilise me

Would you confront the casual, clueless cruelty inside of you

and well I, indeed

You see, I hold the world in my whole hands

And it is now falling to the floor

You made me slip,

Couldn’t you see what I was carrying?

Breaking.

But I know I will still live my life if it kills me

and I suppose I really deeply do love this life, in spite of my clenched fist

Because at least I constantly dare to sink my teeth into something,

That’s my whole thing I think

While others never allow their teeth to grow

Lips pressed to an apple,

nothing can be torn off

So luckily, I break my jaw as I steady it up myself,

As I always have

Holding myself up,

Pulling up my own arms, alone

as I am born again and again and again and again

I lick my salted wounds so much that I turn into salt and jade,

A death within the dark distance between never and today

I desperately desire to be unjaded

But I am made in the fire

I am used and confused

Electric lights, an unlucky strike

Because we danced all night against my own knife

So I am barely beating in my own burning blood

tears of tenderness

and I am torn by the beating knife in your eye

asking, begging

did I do this to myself?

Again and again and again and