Give Yourself a Chance

You stand at the edge again,  
feet touching the invisible line  
between what you dream  
and what you dare to do.  
A sigh escapes—  
not of exhaustion,  
but of quiet hesitation.  

You say,  
“I don’t think I can.”  
You whisper,  
“What if I fail?”  
as if failure is a place  
you’d be forced to live in forever,  
a city built of forgotten dreams  
and dimly lit rooms  
where people sit beside their could-haves,  
pretending they never cared.  

But you do care.  
I know you do.  

Because even when you fall silent,  
your heartbeat speaks louder—  
a rhythm that insists  
you were made to try.  
Not to shrink,  
not to stall beneath the weight  
of imagined catastrophe,  
but to rise,  
to move,  
to give yourself a chance.  

***

I once stood where you do—  
same crossroads,  
same storm of doubts  
circling like heavy clouds  
that never quite rained.  
I looked at the road ahead  
and thought it looked too steep,  
too cruel to love,  
too far away to reach barefoot.  
So I stayed.  
And my staying became a habit.  
And my habit became a story—  
one I kept telling myself  
until it hardened into truth.  

But truth is never fixed.  
It breathes.  
It shifts.  
It waits for someone to rewrite it.  
I learned that when morning came  
and the mirror showed me a stranger  
with eyes too tired  
to belong to someone so young.  
I asked, “When did I stop being alive?”  
The silence was kind,  
not accusing,  
just patient.  
It waited for me to answer.  

***

If you’re not happy where you are, change it.  
The sentence sounds simple—  
perhaps too simple for the tangled complexity  
of our daily fears.  
But simplicity isn’t weakness.  
It’s courage wrapped in plain speech.  
It’s the small voice  
that insists the door you think is locked  
was never really bolted.  
You only forgot how to turn the handle.  

Pack your life in small pieces.  
Let some things go.  
Let others follow you—  
the laughter, the scars,  
the stubborn things that define you.  
Walk toward a horizon  
that doesn’t yet have your footprints,  
and when the world calls your choice reckless,  
smile a little.  
They said that once  
about every soul who ever began again.  

***

I tell you this not as a command  
but as a companion in the dark,  
as someone who’s tasted the stillness  
that comes from staying too long in comfort.  
There’s a numbness that arrives quietly—  
like dust settling on an unused instrument.  
You don’t notice it at first,  
until the strings refuse to sing.  

Shake that dust off.  
Play again.  
Even if the first note cracks.  
Even if your fingers forget where to land.  
In the awkwardness of beginning  
lives the raw electricity of becoming.  
It’s not about skill;  
it’s about spark.  

***

One day, your knees will ache.  
You’ll pause between steps  
to remember how easy it once was  
to run after joy.  
You’ll sit by a window with fading light  
and realize memory is tender,  
but it cannot replace the life you meant to live.  
That day,  
you’ll wish you had started sooner—  
before the excuses solidified,  
before the years slipped quietly  
out the back door of your plans.  

***

So start now.  
The moment you are waiting for  
has already been waiting for you.  
Make a change.  
Move towns if you must.  
Let new air fill your lungs.  
Try a hobby that makes your heart move  
like a wave that never stops reaching shore.  
Revive the guitar,  
the brushes,  
the half-written stories sleeping in your drawer.  
Bring them to life.  
Let them teach your hands  
how to remember.  

***

You might fail.  
That’s true.  
But failure is honest—  
it’s the teacher that tells you  
you are still learning,  
still capable of beginning again.  
Failure does not end the story;  
it deepens it,  
adds texture to the chapters  
you’ll someday call experience.  

Don’t measure yourself  
by the applause of others.  
Some journeys are meant to be quiet,  
undocumented,  
sacred.  
You and your courage,  
sitting side by side  
on a park bench,  
whispering,  
“We are enough.”  

***

I remember a time  
I stepped away too late.  
My comfort had turned to rust,  
and even the familiar streets  
felt foreign.  
It took everything—  
every ounce of fear,  
every fragile belief—  
to move again.  

And then, somewhere in between leaving and becoming,  
she appeared.  

***

She didn’t belong to the past,  
nor to the heartache I once named home.  
She was a stranger at first—  
a wanderer walking through her own undoing.  
But the way she looked at the world  
was a lesson in rebirth.  

She didn’t shout her courage.  
She lived it quietly—  
in the way she applied for jobs  
she wasn’t sure she’d win,  
in the way she booked a one-way ticket  
and didn’t map the return.  
There was a steadiness in her fear,  
a rhythm of trying again  
even when no one was watching.  
And suddenly,  
everything I had told you—  
about giving yourself a chance,  
about breaking the cage  
you built from caution—  
stood before me in human form.  

She was both proof and mirror.  
Proof that change was possible,  
mirror to all I hadn’t dared yet.  
She lived what I had only spoken,  
and in her living,  
I began again.  

***

There is always a moment  
when life asks quietly,  
“Will you trust me?”  
You can say no—  
many do.  
But if you say yes,  
you begin to notice  
how the world rearranges itself  
to meet your movement.  
Doors appear.  
Help arrives.  
Coincidences whisper.  
And somehow,  
you are exactly where you need to be.  

***

You are not late.  
You are not behind.  
There is no race,  
no secret timeline  
where others are winning and you are lost.  
You are simply unfolding  
in your own time,  
like a dawn that refuses to hurry,  
because beauty always takes its time.  

***

Change does not demand perfection;  
it asks only for sincerity.  
Walk toward what calls you.  
Even if your hands tremble  
as you pack your bags.  
Even if love stays behind  
and cries a little at your leaving.  
Even if the new road  
doesn’t promise easy victories.  
Go.  
Because staying still  
is its own kind of loss.  

***

One day you will look back  
and your voice will be calm,  
your eyes filled with laughter lines,  
your hands holding stories  
instead of regrets.  
You’ll finally understand  
that belief is more than optimism—  
it’s a quiet commitment  
to try again tomorrow.  

You’ll be proud,  
not because life turned perfect,  
but because you said yes  
when fear told you to wait.  

***

So give yourself a chance.  
Not tomorrow.  
Not when you have more time,  
more money,  
more certainty.  
Now.  
Right now,  
while your heart still hums  
with questions that hurt to ignore.  
Right now,  
before comfort convinces you  
this is all you’ll ever be.  

***

Be alive.  
Be passionate.  
Be overflowing.  

Live so fully  
that even failure bows its head in respect.  
Live so fearlessly  
that your old self watches in awe.  
Live so truthfully  
that when your knees ache  
and your memory fades,  
you smile at the reflection in the glass  
and whisper,  
“I gave myself a chance.”  

And the silence around you  
will answer back,  
“Yes—  
and that was enough.”