Some of us are on our own clock
James Ivory won an Oscar at 89 years old for the screenplay Call Me By Your Name.
I read a David Brooks piece in The Atlantic called “You Might Be a Late Bloomer” and I finally had a name for the thing I’d known about myself for years.
Brooks makes an argument I hadn’t heard framed this way before. Late bloomers are a different kind of person entirely, wired with a different set of strengths, and those strengths happen to work better in adulthood than they ever could have at twenty-two.
He states that intrinsic motivation is what leads a late bloomer. They don’t do the thing for the gold stars, they do it to see how far they can go. They also have a high tolerance for ambiguity. In other words, you can live with an unanswered question for a long time without freaking out. Those are not skills you learn in school. School rewards the kid who finishes fast and gets it right the first time. Life rewards the person who can sit in the dark for three years and keep going.
The other thing that resonated with me is, he says, late bloomers spend their early years wandering. Sampling. Trying the marketing job, the pottery class, the failed side business, the novel in the drawer. From the outside it looks like a lack of focus. From the inside it feels like you’re not moving fast enough, especially when everyone around you seems to have picked a lane. But all that wandering is part of the process. You’re gathering material, and you don’t know yet what it’s for.
The years I thought I was behind were the years I was building context for my future work. In other words, I was building my foundation first before I built my house.
Brooks also points out something worth repeating to yourself. Age brings judgment. It brings perspective, pattern recognition, the ability to tell what matters from what’s noise.
So, stop measuring yourself against the clock. Protect the thing that brings you joy. Intrinsic motivation is your super power. Count the wandering years as legitimate work. Let the ambiguity live. You don’t have to know how this ends to keep going. You have your own timeline.