the deadline is a damn lie
success has no clock, only gatekeepers
I can’t tell you how often I’ve felt like I’m too late. I felt late at eighteen, I felt late at twenty-three, and I’ve felt late deep in my thirties. It’s a mindset; there's no truth to it. The feeling was that I had missed some secret deadline, one no one ever announces but one we are expected to meet to be deemed successful. I looked at other people, those younger than me, moving faster than me and I thought they got themselves together in time. They snuck in before the doors closed.
The doors, of course, are not real, but I didn’t know that. The deadlines were an idea of my own making. I didn’t understand that, either. “Late” was just a story, dreamed up by my inner critic, designed to self-sabotage and halt me before I even started. That, and too much time spent watching other people.
Success has no clock, only gatekeepers. It’s up to us to decide how much power the gatekeepers have. Gatekeepers count on you feeling as though you missed the moment. They want you to believe you need them. If you feel behind, that’s the system working as designed. If you are convinced you’re too late, you’ve taken yourself out of the running. If you are convinced you need some guy in a room to say yes to you, you’ll wait a long time.
If you can be convinced that real artists, writers, thought-leaders, and business owners were anointed at birth or even discovered on time, you’ll never realise that you can name yourself.
Thankfully, the brain and your life path don’t work on everyone else’s schedule. Opportunities, ideas and new outlooks don’t peak at 25, 30, 35, 40, or any other made-up number. The brain evolves. It rewires and builds new pathways. The brain is continually rewiring. Which means healing is possible. Which means it’s never too late. Which means that who you were is not who you have to be.
👆🏿👆🏿 I wrote this in the early hours of Tuesday morning, and now I’m making it free because I want more of you to see it. I know what it’s like not to be stuck but to feel it. It’s easy to believe you’ve missed your moment. Shame doesn’t just quiet you. It keeps you waiting. Sometimes, we feel frozen, not because we lack discipline or drive, but because of something deeper. Something in the body is holding us there. The brain isn’t just this disembodied thought factory. It’s an entire ecosystem - a body-mind machine shaped by the nervous system, our survival instincts and messages we absorbed long before we even had words for them. Sometimes, it’s not only our minds keeping us stuck, but the body remembering a time when movement wasn’t safe.
You can’t be late to your own life. Not really. And your brain can’t evolve on a self-imposed, strict timeline. Not really. Neuroplasticity proves that nothing is wasted or too late. Every moment of stillness or every year spent circling the same thoughts…every single bloody version of yourself was still a part of what it takes to make you you. Even the moments that seemed useless. Even the years you thought you lost.
I cannot stop giving thanks for all that I thought might kill me.
The information we are fed wants us to believe that if you haven’t been chosen by now, you never will be. Mate, you were meant to make your own timeline! I would not have any books if I waited for the people in the glass-fronted buildings!!! Creativity is an act of movement. Every time you make something, you prove that you are still in motion, that your story is still unfolding, and that waiting is not the answer. If success has no clock, you’re not late. If the doors weren’t real, you don’t have to wait for them to open. When you stop waiting, you become dangerous.
(If you need proof that you don’t need a gatekeeper, read Pay Your Rent With Poems, a practical guide to building something tangible, and yours.)
Love.
✨✨