it’s not the fear, but what you allow it to do with your life.

we are all secretly afraid of failing at something.

every morning you leave the safe shadowlands of your sleep, your warm bed, your brain plump and watered, your hands holding a handful of seeds, only to return to yourself along the backroads, hours later, with your pockets still full of everything unplanted.

it’s not the presence of what-you-might-fail-at, but what you allow it to do with all the days-and-weeks-and-very-last-times-of-your-life.

you have fallen for the lie that perfection is perfection.

it is not.

messy, is an old kind of beautiful, but only people with wrinkles in their dreams know this.

perfection is not perfection.

there are truer ways to find yourself.

the only way out of this is to make the first mark.
just do it.

if this is the day in which your breath is finally unmade, finally undone forever—and that day is coming, then just make the first mark and make your life count for some beauty.

scratch it out in the dirt if you must, and don’t look back—someone once got to see the world because of spit, and dirt, and love.

who cares what others say? do they hold your life? have you given them space to live inside your head?

you dream of writing, then do it—of painting, or singing, or a hundred other things that you hold inside your bones.

the world has never needed beauty more than it does at this moment, right now.

already you are an entire book—a gallery, a song.

it doesn’t matter where it goes, it matters that you start, that you choose to water the-thing-that-you-were-given, instead of the fear-that-you-will-fail.

there is a thing called joy, and it dances with small pleasures and both of them are tender weapons, and they build bridges, and stand on top of the ugly things that try to steal and to destroy.

it matters that you make things, that you face the unknown.

it matters that you choose to create a thing that can never fully be created in exactly the same way by another breathing being.

it matters that someone, somewhere is waiting to see what falls from your hands—perhaps a child, perhaps a man of ninety-nine who is waiting for permission to write it all down, to draw the secret world behind his eyes.

please, make that first, small mark.

start.

{Photograph by Annie Spratt on Unsplash}