They started at 25. I was 52.

Every writer I admired seemed to have a 10+ year head start on me.

I'd read their stories and do the math. By my age they'd had a decade of practice. Two decades of audience. A head start I could never buy back.

I was 52. The math never came out in my favour.

Maybe you've done your own version of this.

The career window you think you missed. The years that went to the kids. The decade in a job that was fine, paid okay, and never felt like yours.

We treat those years like lost time. Proof that we're behind.

Three years into writing online, I see it differently now.

Those years weren't the delay. They were the material.

When I finally started writing, I didn't have to invent anything. I'd spent thirty years collecting things to say. The jobs. The bosses. Raising a son. Starting over in a second language.

The 25 year old I kept comparing myself to can write faster than me. But he can't write about a thirty-year career from the far end of it. Or raising a boy at 50. Or what staying too long in the wrong place costs, because he hasn't paid that yet.

I won't pretend age is ‘a shortcut’. It isn't. You still have to show up and do the work.

But behind is the wrong word for where you are.

If you don't believe me, try this. Write down three things you know now that would have saved you ten years ago. It took me five minutes to fill a page.

Somewhere out there is a person ten years behind you who needs exactly that list. That's who you write for. And no 25 year old can beat you to it.

I don't do that math anymore. The 25 year olds are guessing what life is like. I get to write about what actually happened.

Speak soon,