Daily writing prompt

What’s one thing you wish you had started doing earlier in life?

View all responses

I wish I would have started writing seriously long before I retired. For most of my working life, the idea that I could be “a writer” felt like something other people did—people with more talent, more time, or more confidence. I dabbled here and there, but I never gave myself permission to really lean into it. If I remember correctly, it wasn’t until a couple of years before I left my job that I finally started putting words down on a regular basis. I began blogging on a local newspaper’s website, tentatively at first, half-expecting no one to notice or care. To my surprise, they actually selected some of my articles and printed them in the Thursday paper. I can’t pretend that didn’t make my ego sit up and pay attention. Every time the editor picked one of my pieces, it felt like a little stamp of approval I hadn’t even realized I’d been craving. I’d go to the store on Thursdays and pick up the paper, pretending I was just casually flipping through, when what I was really doing was hunting for my own byline. Then, every so often, a stranger would come up to me and say they’d read my article and enjoyed it, or that it made them think, or that they’d cut it out and saved it. Those moments caught me off guard. I wasn’t used to being seen that way. It felt good—uncomfortably good, in fact—and as much as I joke about having my ego fed, the truth is those small encounters helped me start to believe I might actually have something worth saying.

After I retired, though, I sort of drifted. Without the structure of a job, the days got quieter, and so did I. I became somewhat dormant and didn’t write much at all. It was easier to put it off and tell myself I’d “get back to it soon” than to actually sit down and face the empty page. Then I had a near-death experience that shook me far more than I admitted at the time. Lying there afterward, realizing how close I’d come to not having any more “laters,” it dawned on me that all the words I kept meaning to write could just as easily go unwritten.

That wake-up call nudged me back toward writing with a different kind of urgency. I found my way to WordPress again and slowly became more active there, posting my thoughts, my stories, and the little observations from everyday life. The more I wrote, the more I realized how much I needed it—not just as a hobby, but almost as a way of sorting through my own mind. Somewhere along the way, those blog posts turned into books. I now have fifteen of them out in the world on Amazon. I don’t kid myself; I’m well aware I’ll never be on any best-seller list, and I don’t wake up expecting fame or fortune. But knowing that someone, somewhere, might be reading my words on a quiet evening or over their morning coffee is deeply satisfying. Writing has become a steady companion for me, something that gives shape and meaning to my days, and I plan to keep going as long as my brain cooperates and my fingers can still find the keys.

Sometimes I can’t help but wonder how different my life might have been if I had started writing when I was younger, when there was still plenty of time to steer my career in another direction. Maybe I would have pursued journalism, or tried my hand at fiction earlier, or simply taken myself more seriously as a creative person. I imagine there could have been a whole other version of my working life to look back on and share—one built around deadlines and manuscripts instead of whatever my old job asked of me. But the older I get, the more I realize that regretting lost time doesn’t actually give me any more of it. What I do have is now, and now happens to be filled with blog posts, books, and the quiet joy of finally doing something that feels like it fits. In a strange way, starting late has become part of my story. I write with the awareness that I almost didn’t, that I almost let the opportunity slip by. That awareness makes each page, each post, and each small connection with a reader feel like a gift I might have missed. So while I might always wonder about the life I could have had if I’d begun earlier, I’m grateful for the writing life I do have—and I intend to keep adding chapters to it for as long as I’m here to tell the tale.