YOU'RE NOT TOO OLD. NOT TRYING IS TOO COMFORTABLE.

or How To Do Something Before You Can't Do Anything

“You’ve been very successful considering…”

Considering what?

The person interviewing me then seems to become aware that the qualifier they were about to say to explain why they were impressed with my “success” could be taken as a bit of an insult.

I’m not insulted. I happily finish their sentence.

“Considering I didn’t start doing this until I was kinda old?”

There’s usually a shared chuckle and I’ll make a self-deprecating joke about how I’m so thankful that I’m getting sexier each year.

I started my social media career (which, by the way, used to demand quotation marks for the first few years when people thought the whole thing was silly… I mean, it still is silly but now it’s a multi-billion dollar kind of silly) when I was 43.

Not decrepit but old enough to know friends who were already counting down to retirement. I was most definitely within the cardigan and slippers by the fire time of my life. God, that sounds great. Doesn’t it?

Of course, destiny had other plans for me.

A catastrophic business collapse and 5 years of ducking and diving and scrounging and foraging to keep me and my family afloat.

When you have nothing to lose, betting everything, it turns out, is pretty easy.

I wanted to entertain. I wanted make a living in a way that made me happy.
A way that made me laugh even.

Luckily, for me, social media presented itself to me as exactly that… but I felt old.
Too old.

The other successful content creators I saw were kids. Like, literally kids.

There were days when I would try to set goals for myself and crystalize what I thought would equate as “successful” but imagining myself in that position seemed laughable. Almost embarrassing. Like some weird old guy who shows up at a high school house party.

If I was looking for reasons to stop trying, I had lots.
Not trying was way easier than trying.
Not trying lets you still talk about wanting success without all the pesky actual trying you need to do to attain it.
Not trying is super comfortable.

But not trying hardly ever gets you the things you want.

I realized this…

There are things you can no longer do.

Some you don’t want to do and some you just… literally cannot.
For example, I would like to be a super cool slim 20-something pop star.
Physics, the mechanics of time, and my size 36 waist, however have voted against me. Another failing of reality.

Then there are things that you can still do, that you want to do, but you’re not doing because you think you’re too old.

I sometimes see pictures of myself from 10 or 15 years ago and I remember how I felt at the time. Like a I was fraud. Too old. Embarrassingly old.
Yet here I am, way older than I was back then and I look back at my younger self and think… what a fucking moron.

A great songwriter (me) once sang, we will never be this young again.
I wrote that as a reminder to myself.
If you want to do something that you can do currently.
Then you can decide to at least try to do it.
There will come a day when that choice will not be yours to make.

So get off your ass and start trying.
Start living.
You’re going to be older tomorrow.

You’re not too old.
Not trying is too comfortable.

###

(Pictured: Author, wearing white shirt because Bryan Adams once said it made it easier for the audience to know who was singing, performs first ever live show by the band Brittlestar in 2005 even though he felt old and silly. What an idiot. A young idiot.)