Let’s Talk About … making up for lost time

There are lots of reasons why people become what we call “late bloomers” – we all have our own challenges to overcome to realize our true potential. Some barriers are financial, some are emotional, some are social and so on. And everyone defines “late” in different ways.

I found this post by Ayesha A. Siddiqi named Advice: How Do I Make Up For My Lost Years to be powerful. The person seeking advice from Siddiqi laments having debilitating depression in their 20’s and now, in their 30’s and with the depression under control, they feel like so much time has been lost to them.

What are our expectations for ourselves? What are the expectations that others have for us? My mother had a mindset similar to many in her generation and when I was in my 20’s she pushed me to find a husband and start a family. She was in a panic when I hit my late 20’s without doing either of these. I saw my 20’s as a time to explore the freedom I had just obtained as an adult. Once I did that and got to know myself through doing that, I understood that my mother’s expectations were not mine and my path would be drastically different. In my 20’s I had low paying 9-5 jobs that allowed me my evenings and weekends to enjoy being young in LA in the 1980’s and it was great.

Once I hit 30, I decided that I should stop exploring and start to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up. I would not have found a career that I loved if I hadn’t “wasted” the previous 10 years. I spent that time determining what I wanted. I then spent my 30’s establishing myself in a career I loved, climbing the company ladder, and deciding my ambitions. Lots of travel was involved – my territory at one point was San Luis Obispo down to San Diego and east to the Arizona border. I flew to the company headquarters monthly and this was all new to me and increased my confidence. There were people around me who started climbing this ladder in their 20’s. But I knew that I would not have been ready then to take on that challenge at that time. I needed to reach the point where I was ready to confront my insecurities rather than agonizing over them.

But there were and still are moments I think if things had been different in my childhood, if I had been raised to have confidence and see an unlimited potential in myself, my life might have been easier or better. Siddiqi slaps that regret and second-guessing out of the way.

Siddiqi has so many gems of wisdom in her post:

“Things take the time they need and happen when they can. There’s nothing “late” or “early” about the timeline of your life unless you were given a call sheet at birth.”

“We all would be different people in different circumstances. And it can be tempting to cope with difficult circumstances by mourning the people we would have been without them. But you cannot organize your days around regret. Despite the ways we’re shaped by trauma, we are more than just what trauma leaves behind … Stop looking for yourself in the past, you don’t live there anymore.”

It is so easy to fall into the “woulda coulda shoulda” mindset. We can let a sense of loss for what might have been possible for us become so overwhelming that we lose sight of what we have today and the potential of tomorrow.

“If there are ways to waste [time], surely regret is one of them. Not because we should live our lives in fear of it (which equally allows it to direct your life), but because it postpones acceptance. It pulls you away from the time you still have available.”

She concludes with this statement, which is basically a way of saying what Cher’s character meant in Moonstruck when she did THIS: