There is a version of you who does the brave thing, and a lot of us are waiting to become her before we start. She is calmer than we are. Her voice does not shake. The trouble is that she only ever shows up on the other side of doing the thing, which means waiting for her is the one strategy guaranteed not to work.

Meow or Never is a black and white pattern that reads as ordinary from across the room and turns out, up close, to be made entirely of cats. Which is about right. Cats are small and frequently ridiculous and possess more nerve per pound than anything else alive, and none of them appear to have waited until they felt ready.

Neither do you, most of the time. You send the message you have rewritten eleven times. You put your name forward for the thing you are not sure you have earned. You say the honest sentence in the quiet part of the conversation, heart going like a bird, and you say it anyway.

Courage that shakes still counts. It counts exactly the same as the steady kind.

Nobody watching can tell the difference between nerve and a very good impression of it, and after a while neither can you. For anyone standing at the edge of something with their pulse in their ears, still deciding: you have done this before, and you are more practised at it than you think.