What Is ‘Too Late’?

You know the moment when people ask you what you want to do with your life and then proceed to give you a really long lecture with all the reasons why you’re probably wrong for having a dream for yourself?

Yeah, I’ve always been the kind of person who has wanted to prove such people wrong. Every time I am told that I can’t possibly want to be a writer or an artist, I work harder to prove them wrong. I’ve always been told that the goals I have for my own life are unrealistic and not really practical. But I don’t think so. I’ve never seen my dreams as though they’re insignificant. I’ve never been told that any dream of mine is too small to work on.

And most importantly, I’ve always believed that there is no deadline to achieve the things you want in life. These deadlines are only set to make us feel as though we are losing out on life. Maybe a bunch of people will disagree with me on this one because they have been made to believe, from a very young age, that it is important to carve out a path for yourself before it is ‘too late’.

But what exactly does it mean to be ‘too late’?

It’s not as though there aren’t any examples of people who started from the scratch at later stages of their life. In fact, I think it’s high time everyone understood that people are allowed to take their time climbing up whatever mountain they’ve chosen to scale, instead of telling them to just settle for something practical and do whatever they want ‘Later, when you’ve settled down‘.

And let’s be real, here. The ‘later, when you settle down’ is just a lie that people tell one another.

Like, ‘I’ll go to bed after this chapter,‘ or ‘Just another episode, I promise,‘ or ‘Finish your schooling, and then you can enjoy for the rest of your life.’ Lies. All of them. They seem very promising from where you stand when people say those things to you, but it’s not until much later that you realize that it’s just never going to happen. The ‘later‘ that everyone talks about all the time never really seems to come. It always seems a million miles away, no matter how hard you work to get there.

So, why don’t we just work for the dream we have and that we know we want instead of getting sidetracked by some empty promise of a better tomorrow?

I’ve always hated being told that something I want for myself isn’t practical. But I do let that fuel me. I do like proving to those very people that they were wrong to tell me that I couldn’t have the things I wanted for myself. Spite, as it turns out, is very useful when you want to motivate yourself into doing something, even if it is only to prove others wrong. Especially then, sometimes.

Go do your thing, besties. Don’t let people tell you what you are or aren’t capable of.

Cheerio! Xx

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Featured Image by Bill Ringer on Unsplash