I'm 29. It's certainly a late time to come back to (or start) anything. At least, that's the way I feel. After reading so much lately, I've been feeling the uncontrollable urge to write. I've had this urge for the better part of my life, but only now am I sitting here and typing something, that potentially other people could read.
When you're younger, you have more energies, more ideas, more plans. When you're older, you have a better idea on how to execute, but less passion. For me, I've always carried a perfectionist emblem. This concept of, "I don't want to do it unless I can do it really well." Or really, at least start with some idea of what I'm doing. It makes it hard to get through the thin lead up to any new activity, and leads any sort of passion for it to be mostly fried, quick-energy that can't sustain itself for longer than 15 minutes at a time.
The brain is stupid. Any hobby we take up, inevitably starts with some kind of dull, poorly-lighted fantasy about what it could become. I would imagine even knitters, in Their Own Private Backwoods, fantasize about some Etsy shop that allows them to quit their job at whatever insurance place they shill titles out of, or get them out of whatever living room they really live in. Maids. Assistants. Eating-Out. Sleeping in.
And of course, it's all bullshit. It's just how our brains are wired. There needs to be some evolutionary imperative, some long-term reasoning behind everything. Even as I type this, I'm getting tired and bored. Bullshit.
In addition to the usual psychological violence employed by what should be our own assets, to be marshaled at will and not strove against in some tireless battle that exists perpetually on a field we create ourselves, you have to contend with age. Twenty-nine. You ask somebody older, and it's young. To a young twenty, it's a frightening cusp. Thirty. Old age. A time when you're supposed to be safely indoors before the storm hits.
I learned, by dumb luck and oddly-placed passion, that the age I went back to school and started down my career path happened to be like catching the last train out of the city before they started running hourly, and I went through it fast at that. I'm decently situated, can finally afford bills and screw-around money. The paleontological struggles out of the way, no more gnawing of bones and gristle, it is an odd time. You finally have a seat on the bus, and you're trying desperately to find out where it is actually going.
Of course, this isn't specific to 29; 33 is a good number, or even 25. I can't speak for 33, but 25 isn't really fair. You reach this point at 25 because you're already doing everything right. You have five years to change your mind. You're still firmly in the hearty, strong-backed range of You Can Be Whatever You Want. At 30, the back starts to go, some things get thin, and some things get hairy. You have to specialize to even survive, because although the mind isn't really going, the ability to grow the mind is. At least that kind of growth that comes with acne and shitty waiter jobs.
In some ways you feel stuck. Sure, you have another decade to REALLY figure it out, which is the secret you learn as you get older, regardless of your age. But 33 isn't nearly as shiny as 23. Twenty-three is a pretty age. It's pretty to employers, it's pretty to Hollywood, and that's the crux of the fear. It's not that you're truly immobile, it's knowing that not doors, but entire wings of innumerable houses are permanently closed to you by a failing no greater than the passage of time. You will eventually die.
And so, I write this, not as some broad-chested stand in the face of Time itself, but ignobly, in blind panic at the fear of Regrets.
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