A good garden may have some weeds. ~Thomas Fuller
Does another “30 under age 30” achievement list make you wonder if you’re doing life wrong?
Does a story about a grandma who ran her first marathon in her 80s make your day?
If you’re a “late-blooming” adult, like I am, you’re not alone. We’ve got some exceptional company!
I’m not talking about people who started early and kept going, like Picasso, Kurosawa, or Joyce Carol Oates.
This blog celebrates people who don’t discover their creative passion until their mid-30s or later, or who realize it young but can’t pursue it until adulthood—Later Bloomers.
In this installment, we tackle the hard stuff and examine how early setbacks and poverty might affect late blooming. In Part 2, we explore the good stuff—multiple passions, unique learning patterns, and the lives of famous late bloomers.
How Early Setbacks Can Affect Late Blooming
At age 10, Linda Bach stood by, helpless, while her father die of a heart attack.
She vowed to become a doctor so she could save other lives. At age 20, she graduated at the top of her college class with a microbiology degree and applied to medical school.
During her entrance interview, she faced a panel of six men. Their first question—did she plan to marry and have children?
“Yes,” she answered. “After I finish school and establish my practice.” One of the examiners said under his breath, “God, I’d hate to be your kids.” She didn’t get in.
Devastated, Linda asked her college counselor for advice. He didn’t see a problem. Why didn’t she just get married and have kids?
For a young woman in 1969 with no mentor, entering a male-dominated field seemed impossible. Linda felt rejection by two sources of authority—the review board and her counselor—foretold failure.
Today, thanks to the Internet, we can discover everything about anything. In the past, however, we depended on parents, teachers and libraries to guide us. The quality of that guidance varied from place to place, individual to individual.
For the fortunate, it lead to success. For others, like Linda, its lack slammed the door to their dreams—but not forever.
Linda Bach entered medical school at the age of 46. She is currently a doctor in private practice. Her story is told in Defying Gravity: A Celebration of Late-Blooming Women by Prill Boyle.
How Poverty Can Affect Late Blooming
Albert Einstein had an IQ of 150. Chris Langan’s IQ is so high that it can’t be measured. But you’ve probably never heard of him unless you’ve read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.
Some would say bad luck dogged Langan.
His car broke down and he couldn’t afford to fix it. He could hitch into town for afternoon classes, but the admin office wouldn’t let him transfer to the later sessions. His mother forgot to sign his scholarship application, so they rejected it.
His college took the hard-line. They kicked him out.
Gladwell thinks that Langan could have turned things around if only he’d learned to negotiate with authority figures.
But that, and his “bad luck,” are symptoms of deeper problem—extreme poverty.
While growing up, food was a luxury. He owned only the clothes on his back. His stepfather beat him for eight years.
Langan’s brother explained,
I couldn’t get financial aid either. We just had zero knowledge, less than zero knowledge of the process. How to apply. The forms. Checkbooks. It was not our environment.
Langan might as well have been raised on Mars. The guy with an IQ higher than Einstein ended up as a Rhode Island bouncer for 20 years.
Savant Daniel Tammet speculates that an intersection between talent and delayed opportunity causes late-blooming:
If you’re born in a very poor environment, where you’re not given books and you’re not given good education and then subsequently doors are closed to you that are open to others who perhaps don’t have your talent…I could well imagine that throughout our history there are people who have come into their own relatively late in life.
Chris Langan
Langan now raises horses and hones his cognitive-theoretic model of the universe—a grand theory of all origins. Sometimes he gets oddly poetic. (“I just had a chance encounter with a garden slug, and it got me thinking about time.”)
But Langan will never be published in an academic journal, because he didn’t get the right credentials. Many of his would-be peers (with lower IQs) think he’s a crackpot.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. He’s living his dream—a quiet life devoted to higher learning. And the Internet has become a great equalizer. One day Chris Langan’s name might be as recognizable as Albert Einstein’s.
The Truth About What We Choose to Become
Carl Jung wrote, “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” A brave statement, but sometimes we do become what was done to us, a state known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The National Institute of Health defines PTSD as
an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened. Traumatic events that may trigger PTSD include violent personal assaults, natural or human-caused disasters, accidents, or military combat.
Psychotherapy recognized PTSD in the aftermath of Viet Nam. But PTSD doesn’t affect only veterans of war or victims of atrocities.
Children can develop PTSD after experiencing physical or psychological abuse or even playground bullying. PTSD symptoms can surface after learning about a traumatic experience second-hand.
The numbness, anxiety and emotional emptiness that characterize PTSD will kill the joy, passion and excitement necessary to bloom early.
But there is a great deal of hope.
Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.
~A.A. Milne
Recent media fixation on The Secret makes any discussion of hardship taboo. The “law” of attraction decrees if life doesn’t go your way, you didn’t visualize or believe with enough faith in the limitless universe.
What kind of law tells victims of rape, war, poverty, and other tragedies that they authored their own misfortune?
If youth has left scars, being told to “move on” or “get over it” is insulting.You may never get over it, but the world needs your special gift. Each person has one thing they must do that no one else can.
If this installment rings true, you might want to consult a therapist to cultivate your gift. Or you might not.
But, no matter how thoughtful or wild, forthright or sneaky, typical or unconventional, you must find some way for your gift to triumph over what was done to you.