There are very few things I fear attempting anymore. Life has taught me that failure, while cruel, is often the better teacher. I’ve crossed oceans, started over more times than I can count, and poured my heart into stories that may never be read. But if I were guaranteed not to fail—if some quiet voice whispered that I could try without consequence—I would fall in love again.
There’s a difference, I think, between loving and falling in love. The first I can manage. It’s steady, patient, and within my control. But falling—that reckless surrender of self into another—requires a courage I once had and lost somewhere along the way. To fall in love is to write without outline, to leap into a story whose ending you cannot shape.
W.B. Yeats once wrote, “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” That’s what falling in love feels like—an act of fragile trespass. When you give someone your heart, you’re inviting them into the private architecture of your hope. And for a writer, whose craft depends on solitude and reflection, that invitation can feel perilously intimate.
When I write, I fall in love a little each time. With words, with silence, with the ache of something half-remembered. It’s safer that way—loving through the page. But sometimes I wonder if that safety has become its own kind of exile. Love, like writing, is not meant to be perfect. It’s meant to be alive—to tremble, to err, to astonish.
So yes, if I were guaranteed not to fail, I would fall again. Not because I need saving, but because I miss that brief, terrible beauty of being undone by someone else’s presence. To love like that again—to write like that again—without fear of loss or misreading—that would be the bravest story I could tell.
Perhaps one day, I’ll risk the fall anyway
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