Sorry I'm Late

Week 31: Making it at 37

Write or Die’s inaugural issue, “Private Terrors,” and me!

My essay “Final Girl: Single Parenting, Horror Movies, and the Will to Survive" is out in the inaugural issue of Write or Die! The theme is “private terrors,” and every essay in the issue plays with that idea in a different way. Give it a read— it’s great from beginning to end. The pieces were selected byRichard Scott Larson, a writer I’ve long admired, and I’m so grateful to have my work included in this wonderful collection.

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Two years ago, turning 35. I threw a party for myself and invited triple the amount of people I expected to actually show up. In a chaotic turn of events, no one declined, and by the end of the night you could barely move through the people filling each room.

I used to imagine what it would feel like to be included in a 30-under-30 list. When I was a teen I pictured a page in a magazine with my face on it, which later became an Instagram photo square as I got into the thick of my 20’s and everything moved online. There would be a quote beneath the photo, of course, something witty but forgettable, and I’d be joined by faces I recognized— brilliant, interesting people doing brilliant, interesting things. I’d immerse myself in these images every time I felt anxiety creeping along my spine at how far away I was from that life. One day, I told myself, I’d see my face in a roundup or listicle and I’d know: I made it.

To be clear, I wasn’t doing anything at the time that would have warranted inclusion on one of those lists. I had dreams of being an ingenue but was too busy getting in my own way. I was working in restaurants, taking to-go orders and tipping out waitresses until well after midnight and then drinking until 2, falling asleep at 3, and waking up the next late morning to do it all over again.

When people asked what I did, I told them I was a writer, but the only writing I was actually doing was occasional scribbles in my cheap Duane Reade clearance journals. I’d spent my entire life writing stories and essays and entries in my diaries, but there hadn’t ever been direction on how to pursue the practice long-term. I was ashamed to admit I didn’t actually know what being a writer entailed, and it scared me that I didn’t know the first thing about how to build a career out of the only thing I had any interest in doing.

Instead of trying to figure it out, I lived out my wildest fantasies in my head and pretended I wasn’t dreaming my life away behind the counter of an Upper East Side diner. By the time I started writing work I could expect to place in publications, it was too late for the lists. I had two kids under two on my own, and no plan for what to do with the English degree I was inching through. I turned 30 and felt all those wild, unrealized (and unjustified) dreams come to pieces. That’s it, I thought. I’ll never be a writer.

Seven years and one MFA later, I’m writing full-time, but I can’t imagine how I’d ever trace a path to this point for my younger self to follow. It happened in a hundred ways I can’t explain, and a handful of ways I wish I could forget. I’m trying to be patient with myself— it took the time it took. I couldn’t have gotten here any faster, you can’t not be on time for what is meant for you! Still, I have the feeling in the back of my mind that I’m somehow late to my own life.

Enter: Rory. Her songs have been streaming on loop from every speaker Carolyn comes into contact with. I suspect Carolyn was drawn to her half-head of blue hair as much as she was her melodies, but the thing I love most about her, and maybe I shouldn’t hang so much on this, is that at 40 years old, her career in music is just now taking off. Her debut album comes out in January of next year, and it features a song titled “Sorry I’m Late.” In it, she reflects on her feelings of showing up late to her own life, missing out on opportunities and all the ways she tried to self-destruct before finally showing up to the life she’d been aching for all along. It’s powerful because it’s deeply relatable— who among us hasn’t thought about the what-if’s of our pasts?

It’s never easy to begin something new at mid-life, but it can be done and generally people will see the value in a new beginning— though it’s one thing to begin a career in nursing or business at 40. The capital-A-Arts are a different beast. 18 year olds at the beginning of their adulthood aren’t encouraged to pursue a career in a creative field. Deciding to pursue writing full-time at 36 almost wasn’t worth saying out loud to most people because I knew it wouldn’t be taken seriously. When I told one of the higher-ups at my old job I was planning on pursuing writing after my time at that job came to an end, he laughed and said, you’re a little old to be an artist, aren’t you?

I gave that interaction more thought than I should have before filing it into my mental ‘people who I hope one day never escape my name’ folder. Who knows if his laughter had to do with his own views of the writing industry or his understanding of careers in the arts or his opinions about my abilities or my age. Who knows if he would have said the same thing to a man. It struck me, though, that he thought me too old, of all things.

I’m 36! I’d wanted to say, because in many ways 36 feels very young to me. I’ve long looked forward to being 42, the age at which both of my kids will have entered adulthood and I won’t have to plan my life around keeping them in their school district (I have no illusions around the fact that I will forever be planning my life around them no matter how old they become.) 42 feels like a new beginning for me, a whole second life I’ll have after spending almost all of my adult years raising my children. By comparison, 36 feels absolutely juvenile.

But 36 is not 26. I’m not “old” (what is old?) but I’m also not “young.” I’ve fallen in some in-between space, almost middle-age, where no label or term seems to fit. I see the expanse of time I like to imagine is before me, but I also see what’s behind— enough time for my children to grow into teenagers. It’s nothing to sneeze at.

I feel I need to make up for lost time, and so I push myself in so many areas of my life. I was raising small children and losing myself in wine bottles while other people were building careers that I now look to and admire, and now I need to gain the ground I lost. Sometimes I feel guilty— if only I’d put in that work! But maybe I was busy enough, as Rory sings, just trying to stay alive.

Recently in the comments section of an

Oldster Magazine

post, people shared how they deal with grief and the loved ones they’ve lost. There was so much heartache, and I shared some of my own. I grew up during the early years of the opioid pandemic, and by the time I was 25 I’d lost more friends than my parents had at 57. Then I almost lost my daughter, and in the years she was in cancer treatment we watched other kids die from the illness she was struggling to survive. Age settled into my bones and stayed. I’d never felt closer to 85.

When Carolyn was sick, looking ahead to future years felt precious. It seemed the greatest privilege a person could be granted, to live into their old age. I remember thinking often that I’d do anything for her to have the privilege of getting older. I wish i could tell you I still live with the immediacy of that feeling every day, that cancer flipped some Buddhist switch in me and I’m now always aware of how the present moment is all we have, but time takes all things. More often than I like to admit, I forget what a privilege it is to age. Then I worry that by forgetting, I’m inviting a terrible lesson into our lives, and so I remind myself: to continue to age is often a gift, regardless of its discomforts.

In a workshop last week, we were asked to share our reach goals. It felt unbearably vulnerable but I admitted that one of mine is to land a piece in the New York Times before I turn 40. I tried to say this with as much confidence as I could to the arrangement of anonymous squares on my screen. I waited for someone to laugh. 40? I imagined one of them saying. Isn’t that a little old?

The instructor nodded, then smiled and replied, ‘that sounds like a very reasonable goal, based on the work you’ve done so far.’

I had to chew on that for a moment. It’s work to force the understanding that my goals are achievable. Somewhere inside of myself I know they are or I wouldn’t bother aiming for them, but there is a layer of doubt that hangs like a haze— a feeling that I’m actually being ridiculous. It’s validating to be told, ‘of course you can do that.’

Most of the writers I admire are in their mid 40’s to early 50’s, and many of them published their first book when they were my age. I cling to their stories like I clung to my 30-under-30 dreams and I let them bolster me. I hope the goals I’ve set for myself are within my reach. I hope I’m not too late.

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Today is my 37th birthday. I’ll be seeing Cabaret on Broadway and getting a new tattoo (if there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s celebrate myself!), but I’ll also be making a donation to The Children’s Oncology Group Foundation in honor of Carolyn, and choosing a few items from the St. Christopher’s Child Life Department wishlist.

Both of these causes were impactful during Carolyn’s cancer treatment and I can’t think of a better way to mark my birthday than continue to pay that positive impact forward.