I am afraid of succeeding at the one thing I have worked for long enough to call it a life. This fear has a shape, and its shape is an arrival. To arrive would mean that the years of preparation, the hours of quiet labor, the small and stubborn fidelities to language and thought, have produced something that stands upright without me. Success would mean that the work can breathe on its own, and if it can breathe, then it can also leave. If it leaves, then what am I but the emptied hive after the swarm has already chosen its direction.

There is a crisis in this realization, and it is not dramatic. It is clear, almost clinical. I have spent so long building toward a future in which my work might be seen that I did not prepare for the possibility that it might actually be seen. Visibility is not merely exposure; it is a demand. It asks that I accept the distance between what I intended and what others will understand. It asks that I surrender the illusion that the work is still mine. Fame, even in its smallest and most provincial form, threatens to become an ego trip, a bright narcotic. To bask in it is to mistake the reflection for the source. It is to believe that I am the center of the light rather than a brief surface that catches it.

If I stand at the threshold of a possible recognition, I’d feel precarious. What I have made cannot remain in the careful custody of my intentions. It must be released, and release is a form of disappearance. The pages must go where I cannot follow. The ideas must be interpreted by minds that will not ask my permission. The sentences must endure or fail without my supervision. To let go of what I have created thus far is not an act of modesty but of necessity. If I hold them too tightly, they remain drafts of myself rather than living works. If I keep them near, they suffocate in the warm and private air of my own approval.

There can never be a prodigious literary person in the way the world imagines one. Prodigy implies completion, a kind of monumental certainty. But literature is not monumental; it is migratory. It travels beyond the author, often outliving the circumstances that produced it, sometimes outliving the author entirely. While we are alone with these severe, sober, and difficult ideas, we cannot know if we will be present when they find their readers. We cannot know if the words we place so carefully will ever land on a mind that needs them. We write toward a future that may not include us. We labor in a present that cannot promise any reception. The idea of the prodigious writer collapses under the weight of this uncertainty. There is only the working writer, the solitary worker of sentences, moving through doubt with a kind of disciplined hope.

In the mind, these thoughts remain imperfect. They gather like unfinished architecture, scaffolding without walls, blueprints without gravity. Inside my head they are luminous but incomplete, full of potential but lacking consequence. It is only when they are externalized—pressed into language, given a surface—that they begin to acquire form. And even then, they are not complete. They are simply more available to completion by others. A reader finishes what I cannot. A critic reframes what I thought was stable. A stranger misreads a line and, in doing so, invents a meaning I never intended but cannot fully reject. The work becomes a field rather than a monument, an open space rather than a closed structure.

I may not be around to see whether any of it lands well. This is not a tragedy; it the condition. The distance between creation and reception is often measured in years, sometimes in lifetimes. To write is to accept that the arc of one’s work extends beyond the arc of one’s presence. It is to plant something in a soil whose climate you cannot predict. The crisis of potential success is therefore a crisis of relinquishment. If the work matters, it will matter in ways that exceed my control. If it fails, it will fail without my ability to correct it. Either way, the work must leave me.

I think of bees, whose survival depends on a weird paradox: they must move extremely fast in order to remain still. Their wings beat with such intensity that hovering becomes possible. Motion creates the illusion of suspension. Stillness is achieved through relentless activity. This is the model I am trying to understand. To remain grounded in myself, I must continue to move—writing, revising, releasing maybe—at a pace that keeps me from hardening into ego. If I stop, if I bask too long in any small recognition, I fall. The hover ends. The gravity of self-importance pulls me down.

So I move quickly, not toward fame but away from stagnation. I move to keep the work alive, to keep myself from confusing the work with myself. The hive hums because each bee performs its task without claiming the honey as a personal achievement. The sweetness belongs to the collective, to the ecosystem, to the future. Likewise, whatever I produce must circulate beyond my name. It must become nourishment for someone I will never meet.

In this way, success becomes less a destination than a dispersal. The work travels outward; I remain in motion. And if there is any stillness to be found, it is the stillness of a hovering body, wings beating so fast they become invisible, sustaining a position that looks like rest but is, in truth, a disciplined and continuous effort to remain light enough to let go.