🏞 Labors of love and letting it all go
Late bloomers, labors of love, and other 'L' phrases, Part 3
I am a little late in sending out this post, the third and final one of the series on late blooming, because I wanted to think about it for a little longer before I posted it. The first two posts are here {1 and 2}, if you’d like to read the entire series.
Labors of love
I was 11 or 12 when I started writing. Initially, I wrote poems, and later I graduated to short stories. Some of the poems were truly awful, like the one about the man who was dead because a tree fell on his head, but I enjoyed writing them.
I’d always loved reading, and I regularly skipped homework to read whatever I could get my hands on (this was before the internet), but I had no understanding of the role writing played in my life. I knew I liked to write, but that was all.
At age 17, I put writing away to get on with the more serious business of going to college and becoming an adult.
For one reason after another, I did not start writing again until after my 36th birthday when I started a blog. I learned I loved to write and to connect with others. But that was not all. When I wrote was the only time life did not feel like it was out there and happening to other people.
It would be another decade before I realized I wanted to grow up to be a writer.
I remember that morning very clearly. I was driving back after dropping my younger son at middle school, and I stopped at a traffic light. On my left was a strip mall with a gym, a bagel shop, and a piano school. It had a large parking lot, and there were three recycle bins in the corner, the type you see everywhere for clothes and shoes. Just before the light turned green, a scene flashed into my head. A young woman parks her car haphazardly next to the bins and gets out. She has something in her hand, a package of some sort. She walks to the closest bin, then hesitates. She looks around before quickly opening the jaw of the recycle bin and dropping the package inside.
It was the barest sketch of a scene from a book, the one I hadn’t known I was going to write. And that is what I wanted to do. Write. I wanted to write. It felt like a brand-new realization and both urgent and compelling. In that moment of naive optimism and expansiveness, it didn’t seem to matter whether anyone read what I wrote or if I was ever published. I wanted to write even though every time I sat down to do so, I had to battle massive anxiety, perfectionism, and procrastination.
What looked like an instant of crystallization was thirty years in the making.
Over the weekend, I was writing about late bloomers, those of us apparently lagging in some arbitrary race. The most crucial step in any investigation of late blooming will always involve dismantling social structures and hierarchies that keep us unequal.
And then there are things to consider at the individual, personal level.
Later that morning, when I looked back on the dips and swells of my life, I grew dejected. Here I was at midlife and starting anew.
But is that true? We don’t always start from scratch. What if, just like a Connect the dots puzzle with its consecutive numbers, there are areas of our lives we can only reach/ visit after traveling through the others, and we are right on time for that new project, habit, job, or mindset? If the meandering makes sense only in retrospect, can we ever be late to bloom?
I don’t know the answer, but I am open to exploring these ideas. By rejecting an inflexible and unvarying finish line for bringing ourselves to blossom, we claim authority over the timelines of our lives.
Let it go
A word of caution. Wikipedia describes a late bloomer as “a person whose talents or capabilities are not visible to others until later than usual.” The article adds that sometimes a child who was slower to demonstrate their talent may, as an adult, “overtake their peers.”
If we consider ourselves late-bloomers, I think we have to be vigilant and manage expectations. Considering the long and tortuous journey, we may assume success is guaranteed. It isn't.
I think we have to do this new thing anyway, and we have to let it go.
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