I catch myself doing this thing where I add up the lost years.
I could have started this work twenty-five years ago. I thought I was ready back then. I had the words, the interest, the confidence. Sometimes I mourn all that wasted time — the version of me who should have already been doing this, already be further along.
But it's not true. And I know it's not true.
I wasn't ready. I only thought I was. The person who can actually sit with someone in the hardest part of their life — that person is made of the hard parts of a life. The marriage that went quiet and ended in divorce. The years with no money. The rescuing I had to do until it nearly broke me, and then had to learn to stop. None of that was detour. It was formation. You can't skip to the wisdom. It has to settle, like sediment, and settling takes exactly as long as it takes.
And the world wasn't ready either. Twenty-five years ago, if I'd stood up and said step off the treadmill, you don't have to earn your worth — most people wouldn't have known what I was talking about. The exhaustion hadn't been named yet. The ground hadn't been prepared.
Now it has. Now half the people I meet are already half-saying the thing I'd want to help them say.
So the timing was never a failure to launch early. It was two slow things ripening — me, and the world — that could only ever meet now.
You're not behind. You were forming. And whatever you're aching to begin, the ache itself might just be the sound of it finally being ready.