Late To The World: reclaiming late blooming

Feeling like a late bloomer is like the story of the ugly duckling, watching your peers around you blossom and “get beautiful” whilst you remain stuck in a younger, frumpier, brown feathered body… metaphorically. There’s an indignance that develops with being an ugly duckling, a deep knowing that you too will one day be beautiful and bloom but the path to getting there will look different. Though you might believe that to be true, the world will have you believe something else - that you are somehow behind, late, left, lost, losing out and that you have something to prove.

Feeling like a late bloomer is a symptom of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Not exclusively but definitively. There are so many things that we learn as girls growing up, taught to us by the patriarchal standards of our society. And we then have to spend so much energy and time unlearning these things, it’s no wonder we feel late.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes says that “some societal boundaries are put in place to inhibit creativity, to stop the competition instead of encouraging it; cultural lies that stunt you with complexes that keep you distracted and get in the way of your creativity.”

In a conversation with friends a couple of years ago “late bloomer” was a term that was being thrown around a lot. We were a group of creatives in our late 20’s and early 30’s, falling behind on all of the social landmarks of our peer group - no mortgages, no pregnancies or engagements, in fact between us there were very few steady romances to speak of at all and absolutely none of us were on PAYE. We would meet up for coffee at 10am every Wednesday and talk about our latest creative endeavors (that were earning us little to no money) and big eachother up, pouring fuel on our respective fires to get us over the mid week hump. It was in conversations at these hang outs that we started to reclaim the idea of late blooming. What exactly are we late to anyway? ‘We’re living the dream!’ we’d tell ourselves. Who else is having a prolonged coffee morning with their new best mates on a Wednesday with responsibility for nothing but our dreams and our rent? It was around this time that we coined the phrase “Late To The World”.

If we start to change the perspective on “late bloomers” you could say they are people who question cultural norms and do things in their own, alternative way, which may take longer to cultivate making them feel behind their peers. But couldn’t this also be seen as a brave rebellion? Tapping into our own sense of origin and freedom. Giving ourselves the opportunity to really question and choose.

Perhaps also being a late bloomer is being sensitive to life, feeling everything and moving through things slowly with self-exploration and deep thought and all at your own pace. Haven’t we learnt that sensitivity is a gift, something to be nurtured and respected?

The truth is when you start to pick it apart, blooming doesn’t really have a time limit. It’s a deeply personal and individual journey. So maybe it’s worth taking a moment to question the narrative and ask, is it us who are late? Or did the world we live in create the wrong time line for us? Maybe in the world that we want to build and create we’re not late at all, we’re right on time.

- Megan and Lily