“If you don’t risk anything, you risk more,” is a quote by writer Erica Jong that really resonates with me. It’s absolutely true in so many ways. You can’t have any strong feelings towards something if you haven’t invested yourself into it. It’s kind of an obvious quote, but I think that people can get sidetracked by expectations and they do the exact opposite of what Jong suggests.
I’ve seen plenty of people with huge passions that are unwilling to risk anything to try to pursue them. They huddle into secondary ambitions, weathering the storm of lack of passion in their peripheral interests. They give up on their primary passions because they are too difficult, too embarrassing if they fail, too hard, too competitive. The reasons are so obvious, but it isn’t discussed. I’ve never heard any of these people say, I’m too afraid to fail. Instead, they bash what others are doing, pretend they were never interested in the first place.
But in some respects, it’s not their fault. They have probably been told that their ambitions are impossible or so difficult it isn’t even worth it to try. Perhaps they’ve been told they could do anything, but then failed anyway. Perhaps they were disillusioned in their youths by an immensely talented and well-educated uncle who couldn’t find a job.
And yes, the stakes for these people is that much higher. They very well may fail. Desirable careers are desirable by a lot of people, so it’s much more difficult to open your own law practice for immigration than to become a hotel manager.
But failure is failure. And you’ll either have spent the years trying or persuading yourself into gladness that you never tried at all. And I think this is worse. There will always be that shady road that you’ll never have ventured on to, but you’ll never know what’s on it. If you tried, you might have found that you hated it, found that it no longer existed or found that you could do it. For people like this, perhaps this is the scariest part.
But I want to be one of those people who risks it all for what I want. I’ve been called naïve; I’ve been called a dreamer who can’t exist in the world of today. And I’m scared all of the time. Sure, I have a bit of a dramatic side, but sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night ready to change my career plans, ready to play it safe, ready to decide that I want a stable living and a nice house.
But I can’t live not knowing what will happen if I don’t take a risk. Well, I suppose I could live, but I don’t want to. I couldn’t face a future that might have allowed me what I really wanted, but I was too afraid to take it.
So I want to remember to talk to the scary person at the party, ask them how they got to be so flamboyant and fabulous. I don’t want to spend time envying somebody’s multimillion dollar house because I’ll know going for what I want will give me something better. I’ll tell people who I am and say what I should say. I will never not risk being myself—a person who is lucky enough to know who she is and what she wants—because that neglecting taking that risk is much worse than forgetting the idea that you should have just done it.