Skipping the hard part now is just buy now, pay later for your habits. The interest is brutal.

Avoidance is borrowing. The difficult conversation, the basics you skipped, the part of the work you keep pushing back: none of it disappears, and each week it sits there it gets slightly harder to face. That growth in difficulty is the interest, and it is why an old avoided thing feels so much bigger than it should.

Pick the oldest one and pay a small instalment this week. Ten minutes, one message, the first step only. You are not trying to clear the balance. You are stopping it from compounding, which changes how it feels to carry.