Some risks become dangerous only because you spend years avoiding them.

Avoidance inflates things. A conversation postponed for years becomes enormous, a skill left untried becomes proof of incapacity, and a modest risk grows into something monumental purely through the time you spent not approaching it. The danger is manufactured by the distance, not by the thing.

Think of something you have been circling for a long while and ask what it would actually have cost at the start. Usually the answer is small. Then find the smallest current version of it and do that, mainly to shrink it back toward its real size. Proximity almost always deflates what avoidance inflated.