COURAGE
If I had to choose one word to describe myself on the day I was born — before I had done anything to deserve it, before I even knew who I was — it would be courage.
I know that sounds strange.
But I think I was born brave.
As if it were already there, somewhere in my blood.
Whether that has been a blessing or a curse is another question.
Courage has its disadvantages. Let us begin with those, because I would much rather talk about the advantages.
There is something dangerously close to impulsiveness in courage. Emotion rises quickly, sometimes faster than reason, and suddenly you find yourself making decisions before your mind has had enough time to construct all the reasons why you shouldn't.
We are usually told this is a bad thing.
Think with your head.
Be rational.
Consider the consequences.
Don't take unnecessary risks.
All very sensible advice.
And yet I have always wondered: sensible according to whom?
There is an enormous advantage to remaining where everything is known. The probability of catastrophe is considerably smaller when you never leave the cave.
But there is a problem with caves.
Eventually, you may forget there is a world outside.
We call it the comfort zone, which is a remarkably pleasant name for a place that can become a prison.
Of course, leaving it carries risk. You might fail. You might lose money. You might lose someone. You might discover that what you believed about yourself was wrong.
But staying has consequences too.
We simply don't call those consequences risk.
The Barrier
There is a phenomenon in quantum mechanics that I have always found beautiful: quantum tunnelling.
Imagine a particle approaching a barrier.
Classically, if the particle does not have enough energy to overcome that barrier, the story is over. It should remain on its side.
Quantum mechanics is less obedient.
The particle is described by a wavefunction, and that wavefunction does not simply stop at the barrier. It penetrates it. Under the right conditions, there is a non-zero probability of detecting the particle on the other side.
It has crossed something that, classically, it should not have been able to cross.
I am not suggesting that courage is quantum tunnelling.
Human beings are not particles and fear is not a potential barrier.
But I cannot help loving the analogy.
Because so much of life consists of standing in front of barriers we have already decided we cannot cross.
Leaving.
Beginning.
Saying no.
Saying yes.
Telling someone the truth.
Admitting that something we once chose is no longer something we want.
And I know something about barriers.
When I first started university, there came a point when I realized I was living on autopilot.
I went to class every day. I studied. I did what I was supposed to do. From the outside, everything looked right.
Perhaps that was precisely the problem.
To every observer around me, I was following the correct path. I was behaving exactly as I had been told I should behave.
But there was one observer I could never escape.
Myself.
And she wasn't convinced.
Something inside me wanted to break the pattern. It wasn't particularly rational. It certainly wasn't convenient. And I had absolutely no guarantee that what waited on the other side would be better.
But I listened.
I left home.
I bought a plane ticket.
And after paying for it, I had about fifty euros left to begin a new life far away from everything I knew.
I was terrified.
Not the poetic kind of fear we like to remember years later.
Real fear.
Every few minutes, a voice inside my head would say:
Now you have a problem.
And then:
One more thing goes wrong and you're fucked.
But strangely, beneath all that fear, something else was happening.
I felt alive.
For the first time in a long time, the problem in front of me felt real. I had to learn how to survive. How to make decisions. How to find my way through a world that no longer came with instructions.
Useful things.
Things no classroom had ever taught me.
And I did.
I survived.
More than that, I won.
Not because everything went according to plan.
There was no plan.
I won because I discovered something about courage that I would understand much better years later:
Fear and courage had never been opposites.
Fear was there the entire time.
Courage was simply the thing that moved anyway.
Perhaps that is why quantum tunnelling speaks to me.
Before crossing a barrier, there is no little window through which the particle can look to make sure the other side is safe.
There is the barrier.
There is uncertainty.
And there is a non-zero probability of being found somewhere beyond it.
That plane ticket was my barrier.
Fifty euros.
And absolutely no certainty about what existed on the other side.
The strange thing is that barriers often look absolute only while we are standing in front of them.
Once we cross them, they become part of our history.
Perhaps courage begins there: not in knowing that you will make it through, but in accepting that you cannot know.
The Kind of Person I Admire
When I was a teenager, my sister and I shared a bedroom.
One night we were talking about boys, as teenage sisters do, and she asked me what my ideal man would be like.
My answer was ridiculous.
Blue eyes. Dark hair. Pale skin. Mysterious. Intelligent. Athletic.
Looking back, I suspect I was describing a vampire. Or some fictional character I had unconsciously stolen from a book or film.
Years passed.
And then more years.
If someone asked me that same question today, my answer would contain none of those things.
What is your ideal man like?
Brave.
That is all.
I don't particularly care about the rest.
I want someone whose courage I can admire.
Perhaps because courage, to me, reveals something deeper than appearance, intelligence or charm.
It tells me what a person does when there is something to lose.
And, even more importantly, what they do when nobody is watching.
When We Choose Not to Cross
I have met people who spend years complaining about lives they continue choosing every morning.
They hate their jobs but remain in them.
They no longer love the person beside them but stay.
They avoid their families, their desires, their decisions.
And there is always a reason.
Money.
Children.
Timing.
Responsibility.
What will people think?
Some of those reasons are real. Life is complicated, responsibilities matter, and leaving is not automatically courageous.
But sometimes a reason becomes an excuse we repeat for so long that eventually even we cannot tell the difference.
Years ago, I knew a married man with children.
He would find reasons not to go home. He did not want to spend time with his wife, and often seemed exhausted by his own children. Yet changing his life would have meant confronting consequences — emotional, financial, social — so nothing changed.
His wife was intelligent, beautiful and kind.
That wasn't the point.
The tragedy, at least from where I stood, wasn't simply whether he loved her or not.
It was that two people seemed to be living inside a truth neither of them wanted to touch.
Perhaps they believed they were doing it for their children.
Perhaps they really were.
I could never know.
But I remember thinking that if I ever became a mother, I would not want my children to learn that love means remaining somewhere out of fear.
I would rather teach them that love can also require the courage to tell the truth.
Even when the truth destroys the shape of the life you thought you would have.
Maybe this is why cowardice has always disturbed me more than failure.
Failure at least requires movement.
Cowardice can remain perfectly still.
I saw versions of this throughout my childhood too.
My father spent much of my childhood and adolescence struggling with depression and alcohol. As a daughter, I often experienced his drinking as an escape from a reality he could not, or would not, confront.
Perhaps that judgment is unfair.
Children rarely understand the full complexity of their parents' suffering.
But it shaped me.
It taught me, rightly or wrongly, that I never wanted fear to make my decisions for me.
Perhaps that is why courage became so important.
Perhaps that is why, years later, when I found myself standing in front of my own barrier, I bought the plane ticket.
The Observer
There is another idea from quantum mechanics that belongs here.
Observation.
In quantum mechanics, measurement is not always a passive act. The way we interact with a system matters to what can subsequently be observed.
Human beings are not quantum systems in this metaphorical sense, of course.
But we also change beneath observation.
We perform.
We adjust.
We become aware of the eyes around us.
Sometimes we do the right thing because we believe it is right.
Sometimes we do it because someone is watching.
And distinguishing between the two is much harder than we like to admit.
A person can donate money because another human being is suffering.
A person can also donate money because they enjoy seeing themselves as the kind of person who donates money.
From the outside, the action may look identical.
The difference exists somewhere no observer can easily measure.
And that difference fascinates me.
Because perhaps courage is not what you do while everyone is watching.
Perhaps courage is what remains when the observers disappear.
When I was going to university every morning, the observable version of my life made perfect sense.
I was doing what I was supposed to do.
The problem was that the only observer who followed me home, who went to sleep inside my head and woke up there the next morning, knew something was wrong.
Me.
So I crossed the barrier.
And maybe that is what I have been doing, in one form or another, ever since.
There is no applause on the other side.
No one tells you that you were brave.
No one confirms that you made the right decision.
There may not even be evidence that the other side will be better.
There is only you.
The barrier.
And uncertainty.
Maybe that is why I have always been drawn to brave people.
They do not need certainty before they move.
They move knowing certainty may never come.
And as for me, I intend to remain as free as I know how to be.
To act according to my values even when nobody is there to witness them.
Not to explain myself endlessly.
Not to confuse words with action.
Not to live for the observer.
Because in the end, anyone can describe who they are.
Words are easy.
Actions are harder.
And perhaps, in the strange metaphorical physics of a human life, our actions are the closest thing we have to a measurement.
So yes, I am grateful for that impulsive courage.
For that strange instinct that has so often whispered go while every rational voice around me was explaining why I should stay.
Thank you, Universe.
Thank you, God.
For whatever this thing is that I seem to have been born with.
Because sometimes the most important step of your life is the one you take before you have enough information to know whether you should.
And perhaps courage is simply this:
to cross the barrier without knowing what exists on the other side — and to do it even when no one is watching.