There is a small humiliation I have been circling for months, and I will name it plainly so you know I am not writing from above you. I want to stand in front of a camera and teach. And every time I imagine it, I picture the worst possible version. Me, alone, in some public place, holding a phone at arm’s length, while strangers walk past and decide what they think of a woman talking to herself. The whole project dies right there, in the imagined airport, before I have recorded a single second.

This week I watched a man explain, in a few quiet minutes, why I had been killing it in exactly the wrong place.

He films himself for a living, and he said the most awkward thing you can do as a beginner is film yourself alone in public. You hit record and suddenly it feels as if everyone is watching. He did not pretend this away. He said every creator has felt it. And then he did something I have rarely seen anyone do with a fear: he refused to make it a single wall you either scale or do not. He turned it into a stair.

Do not start at the airport, he said. Do not start at the theme park with thousands of people streaming past. Start in your bedroom. Just learn to record yourself, alone, with the door shut. Then, when that is easy, go to a quiet city park in your own town, the low-key one, where a few people walk the path and give you the occasional strange look and that is all. Grow your nerve there. Only then, much later, go where the crowds are.

Bedroom. Quiet park. Crowd. Three rungs. I sat with that for a long while, because I realised the reason I have not started is that I keep trying to climb all three in one imagined leap, and no one can do that. Of course the picture is unbearable. I have been rehearsing the top of the stair while standing at the bottom, and then calling my terror evidence that I am not meant to climb at all.

This is the thing I most need to understand about becoming visible, and I suspect I am not alone in it. Visibility is not one threshold. It is a graded series of them, and each rung is a real inner door, not a cowardly delay before the real one. The bedroom is not where you hide from the work. The bedroom is the work, the first true rung, and you are not allowed to despise it for being small. You earn the park by living in the bedroom until it bores you. You earn the crowd the same way.

I keep a private rule that the body is my instrument, and that it tells me two different things in two different voices. There is the deep signal, the one that says this direction, yes, walk toward it for years. And there is the surface signal, the flinch, the wave of heat when the camera light goes on, which is not a verdict on the direction at all, only a report on the altitude. For most of my life I confused them. I treated the flinch at the top of the stair as proof that the whole staircase was a mistake. It was not. It was only proof that I had skipped the lower steps, where the flinch is small enough to walk through.

There is a quieter mercy hidden in his advice, and it is the one I want to give you. He said the first few times will be genuinely awkward, and the videos probably will not be good, and that is simply the price of the first rung, paid by everyone, no exceptions. He is not promising you will be spared the awkwardness. He is promising you will not be spared it and that this is normal, which is a different and better promise. The bad first recordings are not failure. They are the bedroom. They are the rung you stand on while your nerve grows the half centimetre it needs to reach the next one.

I work, in my other life, with tools that have made it absurdly easy to produce a great deal very fast. You can ask a machine for a hundred polished things before breakfast. And the strange effect of all that ease is that it makes the slow inner staircase feel like a defect, as if a real person, a serious one, should simply skip to the crowd. But the machine can climb nothing on your behalf. The threshold is yours. The flinch is yours. The half centimetre of nerve is grown only by you, only by standing on the small rung longer than is comfortable. There is no version of this where the loom does the becoming for you.

So here is what I am doing, and I am telling you so that I cannot quietly not do it. I am not starting at the airport. I am starting in the bedroom, with the door shut, recording three minutes for no one, and I am going to keep doing that until the room feels too small for the fear. Then the park. The actual one, ten minutes from my door, the low-key one, where a few walkers will glance and walk on. And only after the park has gone quiet inside me will I think about the crowd.

The land I love sits up near Klisura, and the way you reach a high place there is not by wishing yourself to the top. You take the path that is in front of you, the next switchback, the one your legs can actually manage today, and you trust that the height is built out of steps you were each time able to take. I have wanted the view without the switchbacks. That is the whole of my problem, stated honestly.

Start in the bedroom. It is not a smaller dream. It is the first true rung of the real one, and it is the only rung you can reach from where you are standing right now.