For much of my 20s, I spent a lot of time feeling like I was late. I blamed my teenage self for slacking off and having fun. I blamed him, effectively, for being a teenager. I wasn’t being nice or kind.
When I was 25, I considered myself a late bloomer. I wrote to my 35-year-old self, “Because of him, I perpetually feel like I’m catching up, and I’m sure you’ll feel like that too.”
That feeling hasn’t gone away. There are times when I hear myself say, “Wow, how much longer is it going to take? It’s too late for me.”
Recently, when my brain repeated this statement, something I read in Jeremy Egner’s book Believe came to mind. Hannah Waddingham, who plays Rebecca Welton on one of my favorite TV shows, Ted Lasso, says (emphasis added):
The lovely things that are happening, nominations and the show doing brilliantly and more people stopping me in the street, does it make me a different person? No, because I walk through my front door and I’m still a single mom looking after my girl, and it could absolutely all end tomorrow. I’m mindful of that always. Finding more notoriety later in your career, I think, is perhaps no bad thing.
Up until that moment, I didn’t realize I lived with the assumption that the younger you found success, the better. Precocity was a virtue.
I realized that, while I wished that I experienced more success—in the form of notoriety that Hannah mentions—earlier, there are many perks to finding little bits of it at my age.
For starters, I have a much clearer idea of what I want to say, how I want to say it, and who I’m saying it to. I’m very proud of Creative Doing. I don’t think I could have written it when I was young. I wrote about my earlier work a couple of days ago; while that kind of writing was my best at the time, and it’s fine, I wouldn’t feel great about promoting it now. I’m glad it didn’t reach more people than it did, and I wouldn’t want people to remember me for it.
I also appreciate how I haven’t stopped writing. I’ve not only continued to write, I have learned to enjoy the process a lot more. That was always the point. As long as I keep playing, it’s never too late.
I’m slowly discovering what makes me interesting. In my mid-20s, I’d dismissed my prior life experiences as mundane; they weren’t interesting enough for me to write a good memoir. Upon further reflection, I realized that it wasn’t the experiences that held me back; I wasn’t interesting enough to write a good memoir. Not yet. I didn’t have a chance to do more interesting things yet, either.
I thought I wasn’t rich or famous enough; it turned out that neither of those things mattered, as long as I was willing to put in the work to tell a useful story for my readers.
Next year, I turn 35. Tomorrow is never guaranteed. I still experience the feeling of lateness, and a desire to catch up, yet I also realize how young I am in the grand scheme of things. That’s why “late” in the title is in quotations.
I’m also willing to consider that maybe I’m not too late; that I can define what losing means, and by extension, what winning means.
A line I heard from 50 Cent comes to mind: you can climb to the top of a mountain, or you can ride a helicopter there. You’ll end up seeing the same view. But the experiences will be completely different.