Right on Time

I was always the last one to finish the mile in middle school. Chubby and morally opposed to forced exercise, I found myself minutes behind my classmates– always sweaty and short of breath by the end of my seven laps, embarrassed that I couldn’t keep up. And, in some ways, it felt like that behindness, that feeling of being in last place followed me everywhere. I was the last of my close friends to get drunk at a party, the last of us to have my first kiss, the last to get my driver’s permit. 

Even now, at twenty-two and far from middle school P.E., I still sometimes get scared that I’m behind somehow. That I’m not hitting milestones fast enough. That one day I will wake up to find all of my friends ahead of me: happy and married with perfect jobs and planned-out lives. And that I will be standing there in their dust, sure that I could’ve caught up if I had just run faster, pushed harder.

`Recently, in the midst of a one a.m. panic over this very fear, I found myself searching for songs about late bloomers on Spotify. Like always, music seemed to assure me I wasn’t alone. Modest Mouse’s “One Chance” builds to a frantic climax, with Isaac Brock crooning about how we only get one chance to do everything right. Mitski’s “Class of 2013” ends with her asking her mother if she’s still young, if she can still dream. Maybe, everyone feels like a late bloomer sometimes. 

But, the truth is, there is no “right time” to do anything. There is only the time you choose, the moment you decide. Like the Secret Sisters sing on their aptly titled “Late Bloomer,” “it doesn’t matter when you bloom/it only matters that you do.”

— Jade Sham