You want to try something new, but you worry you’ll be bad at it—you fear you’ll humiliate yourself—and so you never start. But I knew that a fear-driven life was one where I never made plans, where I stopped myself from dreaming ambitiously. It meant living safe and small, always hedging against the worst-case scenario. Instead, I wanted to live

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I know now I was grieving something , the death of an ambition. I started attending reading events at Green Apple Books, my local bookstore, because it was something I liked in grad school, and I had to get myself out of the house. Going to those events was (is) a way of traveling without moving; they have afforded me an incredibly valuable... See more