A very good friend recently told me he'd be in the first row rooting for my book.
He said it like it was obvious. Like the book was a thing that exists somewhere already, mid-journey, simply not arrived yet. And I laughed and said something light, because that is what you do when someone hands you your own dream across the table and you're not ready to hold it in public.
He's not the first. People have been telling me to write a book for years. Different people, different rooms, different decades of my life, same sentence. And every time, I do the same strange thing: I say thank you, make a joke obviously, I glow a little, and then I put the sentence somewhere in the back of my head, in a drawer I never open on purpose.
Here's what's surprising about that. I'm not super careful and super structured with my life. I never have been. My whole pattern is: I wonder if something is for me, so I go and find out. I've jumped into things with no safety net and no plan B more times than I can count; jobs, cities, decisions that terrified people who love me. Risk is not the thing I avoid. Risk is practically my love language.
So why not this one?
For a long time I told myself it was timing. Then workload. Then that I had nothing to say yet, which is a funny lie for someone who never stops having things to say.
But I think the real answer is smaller and stranger: I liked it dreamy. A desire you never test can never disappoint you. It just sits there, glowing, perfect, unwritten. The moment you make it real, it has to survive reality - deadlines, sales numbers, other people's opinions, the market, the machine. I think I was afraid that touching it would make it transactional. That the world would take the one thing I kept purely for love and hand it back to me with an invoice attached.
So I kept it as a light in the distance. Something to walk toward but never arrive at.
Except something has shifted this year. I've been leaving old versions of myself behind at a pace I can barely keep up with - and one of the things that left, apparently, is that fear. Because when my friend said the thing about the first row, for the first time the thought in my head wasn't one day.
It was: why not now?
I don't know yet what the book is. That's fine. I didn't know what the job was either, when I was twelve and writing in a diary that I wanted to do "something with computers" and something with words. Half of that came true in ways I could never have predicted.
Maybe it's time to collect the other half.
No promises. But the drawer is open now, and I'm looking at it.