What would you love if you didn’t have to be good at it?
I’ve been carrying this question around lately like a pebble in my pocket. Every time I turn it over, it shows me something new.
For me, one of the answers has been dancing.
It’s funny, because this shouldn’t feel like a revelation. When I was a kid, I was in dance classes every week. But then I got hit by a car. I survived, of course, but looking back I wonder if something in me got knocked loose that day too. Because after that, I traded dance shoes for soccer cleats. I never went back. And for years, if anyone asked me to dance, I said no. My excuse? I’m bad at it.
But here’s the truth: that wasn’t the whole story. Somewhere inside, I still loved it.
It took years before I realized that joy doesn’t care if you’re good at it.
Recently I went to a bar in Montana and danced my ass off. No choreography, no plan, no partner to follow for parts. Just music and movement. And it felt like falling back in love with life. It turns out I’m not bad at dancing after all. I’m not especially “good” at it either, but that’s not the point. When I get out of my head long enough to trust my body, it remembers what to do. And that’s enough.
That night I laughed harder than I had in months. I left sweaty and free and alive. And it reminded me of something my grandmother once told me. She’s 87, and she said, “Caitie, never stop laughing and never stop dancing.”
At the time I brushed it off as one of those sweet Nana things. But lately I’ve realized she was onto something deeper than I even knew.
The point of all this isn’t that love means giving yourself away to joy without boundaries. Quite the opposite. Love, in its truest form, can still exist while withholding access. I’ve learned that I can love someone, want them to win, to soar through life, to be happy, even if I can’t be a part of their story anymore. (Stick with me, I’m going somewhere with this hard pivot lol)
That’s what love is to me: not control, not possession, not “all or nothing.” Love is cheering for someone’s wholeness, even from the sidelines.
And when I think about it, the experience of loving life mirrors that too. To love life is to let it be what it is — messy, imperfect, unpredictable — and still choose to root for it. Still choose to delight in it, even when you’re not in control of every outcome.
Love your life with chosen abandon. With meaningful, wholehearted abandon. Life gets unimaginably more valuable when we love it and love. And love, in case you haven’t heard, doesn’t need to make sense. It certainly doesn’t require us to be good at it.
So I’ll ask you:
What would you love if it didn’t have to make sense?
What joy is waiting for you outside of being taken seriously?
What’s worth doing badly, just because it makes you feel alive?
Because in a world that constantly pressures us to monetize everything, maybe the bravest thing you can do is keep something sacred. To laugh too loud. To dance off-beat. To do it for no reason other than it brings you back to yourself.
That’s what I’m learning. That’s what my Nana meant.
Never stop laughing. Never stop dancing.
This is also what Braver, Not Fearless is about — learning to live with the mess, with the uncertainty, with the imperfection. To choose joy and trust yourself enough to let it matter, even if you’re not “good at it” and it doesn’t make sense to a single person but you.
Xx, to the brave thing,
Cait
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I truly can imagine you dancing and happy, and is a lovely picture ❤️.