Lessons for late-bloomers: stop running away from yourself

“I have said that running away is what I am best at. And yet if you run not to get somewhere, but to get away, you may find yourself running in circles.” — Ruth Kluger, Still Alive

I called a colleague of mine yesterday to talk about how she does it. As a fellow humanities major, and charity sector manager, how has she excelled, built her professional brand and identity, and ended up where she is now? I’d been reflecting about where I am in my career, or perhaps more accurately, who I am in my career, and I wanted to talk with someone energised and wise, who seems to be doing it right, and who, at least from my perspective, inhabits themself in their job.

At first she said something I could completely identify with. She’d bounced from one thing to the next, following opportunities as they arose. But then she took a turn. “I don’t know, Barton, sometimes I kick myself for not following one thing through longer, because I get interested in something, see a piece of myself in a new role, and go for it.” When she said this I instantly recognised the fundamental differences in what had defined our journeys up the career lattice. Whether or not she feels this way, it seems to me that in her hopping around, she’d followed her interests and things that elicited the best in her. She’d run towards things. Too often I’ve done the opposite: run away.

One of the habits of latebloomers is to believe that success will come when we shed our old selves and become someone new, as if the weight of who we’ve been prevents us from rising. Because of this, latebloomers run the risk of becoming perpetual wanderers. In search of our best self “out there,” we’re prone to living our life on the run, from one place, one career, one identity to another. Sometimes this is rooted in real trauma. Perhaps something horrible happened in your childhood and youth which primed you to always be ready to run — as a matter of survival. Or perhaps, as with me, it’s just, for one reason or another, you’ve lived your life holding your roots tightly in your arms, fearful of dropping them into the wrong soil.

Running away feels, at least in the short term, amazing. If you’ve never felt the zeal and euphoria of getting rid of your belongings, and hitting the road or seas for a new life thousands of miles from where you started, you are missing out on something. Ruth Kluger, in her Holocaust memoir, Still Alive, captures the point when she writes, “Because running away was the best thing I ever did, ever do. You feel alive when you run away. It’s the ultimate drug, in my experience.” Like any drug, with running away there’s only so long you can do it before you need your fix just to feel okay. By my mid-thirties, I’d tried so many things, tried on a number of identities, and moved so many places, I’d lost myself, even though I’d experienced so much. This is when I started asking myself, well, who am I anyway, and where do I find meaning, purpose, and energy?

I’ll save you the long drawn out story of painful trial and error in attempting to find myself and skip to the part where the seeking has largely drawn to a close, and I’ve arrived. I’m 39 now and doing all I can to face up to all those things in my past that I regret, or that have hurt me (whether I’ve been the innocent, or participant, in the harm doing). Introspection is painful, as anyone who’s been through therapy will know. Sometimes, in order to heal, you need to reopen a wound before it cauterises. But you can live with scars — you can’t live with festering wounds. You must try and believe in healing, believe you can come home back to yourself, and believe you have a future.

Latebloomers often have monsters or ghosts from the past in their psyche walking around daily life as if they’re flesh and blood here in the present. There’s a great poem in the Indianapolis Review from a poet named Chantel Massey called, “After Toni Morrison’s quote from Beloved, “Anything Coming Back To Life Hurts” (A Poem to My Younger Self).” The poem ends in a tone of redemptive realism I can relate to.

The monsters

Live within you. They are like cicadas

Loud & return when it’s their time.

It doesn’t get easier

you just get better at it.

Whatever monsters in your psyche haunt you, know you can learn to at least tame them, get on with life, and piece yourself back together.

However tempting the idea of running from the pain of being who you are, know you’ll never arrive at your most authentic self until you look back and bring your whole self forward with you. This same colleague I mentioned above once said to me it’s like I’ve lived a dozen lives because of all the places I’ve lived and jobs I’d had. This is true, but also not true. I am just one person with one life, no matter what coping delusions I may have constructed about the ability to be someone else. I’ve been trying to integrate these lives, or left behind pieces, into a healed, whole adult, and I think I’ve done a fairly good job of it. I’m getting there, anyway, and if you need to hear this, please know, you are worthy of love just because you are you. You don’t need to be anyone else.

To bring this back to career direction and identity, I want to share one last thing. In learning to love my most unloved parts, I’ve come to know myself better: my strengths, my weaknesses, my passions. My colleague friend gave me super advice yesterday which is worth repeating. Almost no one ends up in a job in which the whole self can sing in full expression. But some jobs will align with most of you. Learn who you are and begin to orient yourself towards what brings the best out of you, one piece at a time if needs be.

I hope you find the person you’re looking for.