Latest / Thinking Out Loud | Kimberly / Is it Too Late? | Thinking Out Loud
Transcript
- Kimberly: Is it too late? Maybe. Maybe we're asking the wrong question. We have this strange relationship with time and success. We look at someone who is 22 already famous and think I'm behind. we look at someone who got married at 19 and think, I missed my chance. We look at someone who built a million dollar business, went viral, found their person, published a book, changed careers, or became wildly successful, and we start treating their timeline like a deadline on our own. Sometimes we stop trying. Not because we don't want the things anymore. Because we've decided the window has closed. I wonder how much of that comes from scarcity. Their belief that there was one opportunity. One season. One chance to become the person we were supposed to become. However, opportunities often live in a garden. Gardens have taught me something about timing. There are things happening in my garden right now that don't look particularly impressive. I'm planting garlic. I'm mulching my beds. I'm adding compost. I'm cleaning up spent plants. I'm saving seeds, I'm pulling weeds, I'm protecting the soil. I'm figuring out what needs to be pruned and what needs to be covered, what needs to be brought inside what needs to be left alone. if you were looking at my garden right now and said, wow Not much is happening here. you might be right. Visibly. That doesn't mean nothing is happening. I'm preparing the garden for a season. You can't see yet. Maybe that's what some of us are doing with our lives. Maybe you're not behind. Maybe you're not wasting your time. Maybe you're in your fall. You're harvesting what you can, you're cleaning up what didn't work, and you're putting nutrition back into the soil. You're saving what you want to carry forward. You're letting some things die because they never were meant to survive the winter. You're preparing because winter is coming. Winter isn't the end of the garden. Maybe your winter won't last as long as you think. Maybe spring is coming. When it does, your success might look overnight to everyone else. They're seeing the flowers, the growth, the things that suddenly took off, and they'll say, Wow, you got lucky. Wow, that happened fast. Where did it come from? You know how much work you put in. You planted the garlic, you mulched the beds, you made the compost, you pulled the weeds, you saved the seeds, you prepared the soil, you kept tending something that no one else could see. So today I want to ask, is it too late? I don't simply mean for your career. I mean love. friendship, motherhood, creativity, changing your mind, starting over, building something, becoming someone you haven't even been able to meet yet. Maybe before deciding that the season is over, you could ask yourself a different question. What season am I actually in? Welcome back to Thinking Out Loud. Hi, it's me Kimberly. Before we go any further, a quick note. This podcast is for reflection and conversation, not professional advice. Take what resonates and leave the rest. Here we slow down and we explore life's great areas, especially in relationships and behavior patterns we can observe and reflect on. I am not here to tell you what to think. I am here to offer framework to help you understand your relationships, strengthen your thinking, and hold space for complexity. Let's get to thinking out loud. when you start working towards something you want, have you noticed how quickly we are to compare? Good or bad? Have you noticed it? I remember how easy it seemed for everyone else to get pregnant. I would look around and think, why is it so easy for everyone else and so hard for me? I never stopped to ask myself, maybe my body was telling me something. Maybe the conditions I'm living in aren't exactly ideal for growing something. Thinking about a garden. If you don't prioritize the health of the soil, some things will never grow. For a long time I was stressed out all the time. I was living a lifestyle of overproductivity. I rarely had a period. I kept pushing and pushing my body and I didn't realize how much information my body was giving me. My body had often been inflamed. I wasn't creating a healthy conditions for myself. at the same time, I did need medical intervention. I think that's an important thing to say because sometimes we can romanticize this idea that if we just rest, believe in ourselves, or try hard enough, everything will grow naturally. That's not always true. Sometimes fungus grows in the soil, and you need help from modern technology to deal with it. sometimes we don't have the seeds. Maybe we're out of eggs. Maybe we need to consider embryo adoption. Sometimes we have seeds, but we don't have a place to grow them. Maybe we consider surrogacy. My point is that sometimes we focus so much on what we don't have that we assume we have to give up. There may be another option and sometimes the option is to let it go. You might realize, actually I don't want kids, or I don't want a garden. That's a lot of work. Valid. You don't have to keep watering something just because you once wanted it. I think we can see this in friendships too. We can see it when we're trying to find a partner. Sometimes the people we want to attract into our lives simply haven't found us yet. Or maybe we haven't built the foundation necessary for a meaningful connection to grow. Have you ever tried to grow a tree? my gosh. The headache I have. Because I didn't realize I had to prune the shoots that were coming out of the ground around a tree. I'm over here thinking I'm growing one tree and apparently I'm growing five. They're all using the same root system and I have to slowly cut each one of them down until I'm left with the strongest one. This process can take years. That's part of growth we don't always want to hear. Sometimes you don't simply plant something and watch it grow. You have to maintain it. You have to prune it. you have to decide what gets to stay and what has to go. And sometimes that process hurts. I think relationships can be like that. When you don't know how to maintain a healthy relationship with someone, sometimes pulling back can be incredibly painful. It can even shock the relationship. sometimes we were giving it our all, but we were leaving nothing for ourselves. sometimes we take too much too fast and that can shock a relationship. It can leave someone feeling overwhelmed and abandoned. That's why just because closes happen quickly doesn't mean it necessarily is going to last. we have to consider the process of re-establishing suitability in the relationship. Otherwise, the shock can literally kill off the plant, kill off the relationship. Sometimes time and distance are enough. Sometimes trees or people come back maybe we maintain the relationship. Maybe we know how to build a healthier foundation. Maybe when pruning happens again, we know what we're doing. I think this applies to starting our careers too, or creating something meaningful for ourselves. I think we beat ourselves up way too quickly. Someone will say, I tried, I failed. I wonder, did you really, sweetie? Did you really fail? Or did you try to bloom in the wrong season? sometimes we often force ourselves to bloom simply because we think we're ready to bloom. Being ready isn't the same thing as being in the right conditions. Maybe some of this is cultural, We rush people through school. We care about getting good grades more than understanding what we're actually learning. We rush people towards college, towards careers, towards marriage, towards having children, towards success. We create these invisible timelines and then act surprised when people feel like they're behind. Maybe we need to become a culture That doesn't rush people to bloom. most things that are beautiful and lasting don't rush to bloom. They take time to root. They need time to establish themselves. They need time to become strong enough to withstand the weather. And yet, sometimes things really do happen quickly. Sometimes you meet someone and it just works. It clicks. Sometimes you make something and it takes off. an opportunity comes along at exactly the right moment. you take a chance and it works. you look back and think, damn, that was fast and that's okay. I don't think slow growth is inherently better than fast growth. and I don't think fast growth is inherently better than slow growth. Sometimes we get to live in the moment. Sometimes the opportunity is right there and we don't need to overthink it. We can take it, we can enjoy it, sometimes we can have no regrets about it. The point isn't that everything has to take years. The point is that we don't always know what season we're in. We shouldn't mistake not blooming yet for never blooming. Sometimes you're planting, growing, pruning, resting, harvesting, and other times you're realizing you don't want that particular garden anymore. all of those things are part of life. None of them by themselves mean you're too late. I think people love the idea of having a garden more than they actually love the work of having a garden. Because the idea of a garden is beautiful. Fresh vegetables you can just pick outside. Flowers everywhere. Walking outside and picking something you grew yourself. It sounds wonderful. Then you actually have a garden. There are weeds, there are bugs, spiders, things eating things you planted, plants that didn't make it, things you forgot to water, things you planted in the wrong place. there are days when it's 90 degrees outside, and the last thing you want to do is go pull out some weeds. suddenly you're asking yourself, do I actually want the garden? I think we do this with our lives all the time. We fall in love with the idea of something. A relationship, a career, a business, the audience, being a creator, being famous, wanting a house, wanting a family, wanting that lifestyle. Whatever that means. Do we actually want to do the work that is required to maintain it? For me, I think about this podcast. I love this podcast. And I have had so many pity parties about this podcast. I have sat there and thought, Am I even making a difference? I'm probably just a whiny woman with a microphone. What am I even doing? my poor bestie has had to listen to me do this more than once. She's basically like, no. Too late, Kimberly. You're too good at this. You don't get to quit. Which honestly, she's basically my Edna from The Incredibles telling me to pull myself together, woman. Why do I complain? Because sometimes I forget. I'm not ready to bloom yet. I'm still growing. I'm still finding my groove. I'm playing around. I'm having fun. I'm on a journey and I'm learning how to enjoy that journey. I didn't when I finally got pregnant the first time. I didn't during the whole fertility treatments. I was a terrible travel buddy during that time and I want to learn how to enjoy the journey. I might still whine about it. I'm learning and developing. I'm growing the truth is, I'm actually having fun. I really am enjoying it most of the time. I think I'm just pressuring myself and pushing myself to do more than I can. And before I started this, I didn't want to only build a following. I didn't want to chase the numbers and hope that eventually somebody would tell me I had made it. I wanted to find my foundation. figure out what I had to say, what I cared about, how I wanted to communicate, what kind of conversation I wanted to have. What kind of creator I wanted to become. I'm still establishing that foundation. I have footing now. I know where I'm heading. I know what I want season two to be. I'm starting to understand what kind of garden I'm trying to grow. I think there are other kinds of gardeners too. Some people are chaos gardeners. They're throwing seeds everywhere, they're trying everything they're experimenting they're chasing whatever looks interesting they're having fun and good for them sometimes that's how you discover what you're good at you don't know which seeds is going to take you can plant ten different things and try something. You can abandon it. You can try something else. You can go back to something you tried three years ago. You can discover you're pretty good at something you never expected to enjoy. Eventually you find something that works and you decide, okay, this one. Maybe you stick with it. Sometimes you even go back to the things you struggled with before and realize, I didn't hate this. I didn't know how to grow it yet. I think that's a completely valid way to live there are people who fall in love with the idea of having a garden and eventually they realize I hate gardening I hate bugs I hate spiders and listen for some people spiders are not negotiable they're going to be in your healthy garden they're probably going to be in the unhealthy gardens too and you might decide you know what no gardening for me and that's valid too because sometimes what we call failure is discovering that we don't want the things we thought we wanted. You don't have to spend your entire life maintaining a garden you never truly wanted. Then there are people who rush in so quickly that they create something they can't manage. They plant 50 things. They build an enormous garden. They buy all the tools. they create a schedule they can't possibly maintain. And six months later, they're exhausted. The garden is unsustainable. I think we do this with our lives too. We try to build the biggest version of our dreams immediately. We want the huge audience, the perfect business, relationship, house, life. We don't stop to ask, can I even maintain this? How can I keep showing up? How can I be consistent? What system would make this easier? Where do I need help? What tools would make this more manageable? What can I even afford? Not just financially, but emotionally, physically, and mentally. Healthy gardens aren't maintained by one person standing in the middle of them screaming, GROW! they develop ecosystems, layers, add compost, mulch, build supporters, plant things that help other things grow, attract pollinators, Learn what needs more water and what needs less. You figure out what belongs together. You figure out what competes for the same resource. Create shade, create structure, and you learn. Over time, the garden becomes easier to understand, not necessarily easier, rather more manageable. And I think that's what we're missing sometimes when we talk about success. We're so focused on How quickly can I grow? How quickly can I be successful? get followers? How quickly can I find my person? How quickly can I build the career? How quickly can I become the person I want to be? maybe the better question is, what can I sustain? I don't need the garden tomorrow. I need a garden I can keep tending to. maybe that's what building a life looks like. Not creating the perfect version of yourself overnight. not forcing yourself to bloom because everyone else appears to be flowering. Not chasing every dopamine hit that tells you maybe this is the one. Maybe it's about finding something you genuinely enjoy enough to keep tending. Maybe it's building a foundation strong enough to support growth you want. And maybe it's learning how to accept help. Maybe it's making things easier where you can. Letting some things die, trying something different, planting ten different seeds and seeing what happens. I still cannot successfully grow zucchini plants. Discovering that you don't even want the garden. It's realizing you don't need to have a perfect garden yesterday. You can build something that can survive tomorrow and maybe healthy ecosystems take time. They take layers, maintenance, adaptation. Most importantly, they take something you can't manufacture overnight. Roots. so what season are you in? Not your entire life. I'm talking about the thing in your life you want. The relationship, career, friendship, family, creative projects, business, dreams. What season is that in? I think sometimes we look at a garden and say, we don't have to flower yet. And maybe you're not in the flowering season. Maybe you're in spring. Spring is about planting, starting something new, trying things, experimenting, taking risks, learning what works. Spring can be exciting. You can look at a tiny seed and imagine everything it could be. Spring can be uncertain. you don't know what's going to take. You don't know what's going to die. You don't know what you're doing yet, and that's okay. Then there's summer. Summer is also tending, watering, weeding, protecting, showing up constantly, dealing with the pests and the problems, doing the boring maintenance. Summer might be one of the least glamorous seasons. Because you've already planted the thing. You're not getting the excitement of starting. You're not necessarily getting the reward of harvesting. You're simply taking care of it again and again and again. Watering the plants, pulling the weeds, checking for pest, fix the things that broke, showing up, and sometimes You have to keep doing that when nobody is impressed, and that's a lot of building something meaningful. Eventually you get to fall. Fall is harvesting. It's evaluating what worked, saving seeds, preserving what you can, clearing what finished, adding compost, mulching, pruning, preparing the beds, winterizing the irrigation. Planting garlic or other fall crops and protecting preannuals planting next year's garden. Fall is a season of looking back and forward at the same time. You're asking, what did I learn? What do I want to keep? What needs to grow? what do I want to plant again? What do I never want to do again? Then there's winter, rest, repair, planning, dreaming, studying, recovering, waiting, letting the soil rest, preparing your tools and systems, looking at what needs to change. I think we have a really unhealthy relationship with winter. We tend to look at that season. there's nothing appearing to happen and assume we've failed. Winter has a purpose. Every season has a purpose. Every season has something to teach you. sometimes we're building foundations before we even realize we were building one. Sometimes we were learning skills we thought were completely unrelated to where we would want to end up going. Sometimes you were making mistakes that you thought you wanted and you actually did not want. Sometimes you were developing the emotional capacity to handle something you weren't ready for yet. sometimes you were learning how to communicate, how to set boundaries, how to risk, how to ask for help, how to tolerate disappointment, how to try again. that was still growth. Even if there wasn't a flower at the end of it, Then there are the weeds. We tend to look at every weed needs to be pulled. Sometimes pulling weeds creates space for something else to grow. Sometimes the thing taking up all the nutrients in our life needs to go. A relationship, an expectation, a career path, a habit, a version of ourselves. sometimes we pull something out and suddenly there's room. Room for sunlight, room for water, room for another plant, room for ourselves. And here's the thing: you can always pull too much. You can become so obsessed with getting rid of everything that isn't perfect that you disturb the soil itself. You can overcorrect. You can prune so aggressively that you damage the plant. You can spend so much time trying to eliminate every problem that you never give anything enough time to establish itself. I think we do this to ourselves too. We think I need to fix everything, heal everything, become better, get rid of every bad habit, become the perfect version of myself. suddenly we're standing in an empty garden wondering why nothing is growing. you don't need to pull out another weed. Sometimes you need to let them grow. That's why finding your season matters. Because your season tells you where to look. If you're in spring, maybe you need to experiment. If you're in summer, maybe you need consistency. If you're in fall, maybe you need to evaluate and let go. If you're in winter, maybe you need to rest and go enjoy the Christmas lights. Sometimes you need safety before anything can thrive. That's something I think we forget. Some plants don't need more fertilizer. They need protection, shelter from the wind. They need water. shade. a different environment. And sometimes you are trying to force yourself to grow in environments that isn't safe enough for you to thrive in. No amount of yelling at a plant is going to make it bloom in conditions it cannot survive. sometimes We have harsh winters, really harsh ones. The kind of winters where you start wondering if spring is ever coming. You keep waiting, you keep looking at someone else's garden and thinking, why are they blooming? Why am I still here? And after enough time, you might start believing the winter is permanent. That's where I think scarcity can really get us. because when we don't know how long the winter will last, We start making decisions as if it will last forever. We give up. We stop planting. We stop tending. We stop learning and we stop believing that anything could grow here ever again. Dramatic music. Dun dun dun Sometimes spring does come. We've been in a winter for so long that when something finally starts to grow, we don't know what to do with it. we might even pull it out ourselves. Because we've learned to expect disappointment. protect ourselves from hope. decided that if we don't hope for anything, we can't be disappointed when it doesn't happen. that's not the same thing as being safe. Sometimes it's another way of staying stuck in winter. I don't want to tell you that spring is definitely coming. I can't promise you that. I don't know what your life is going to look like. I don't know whether the things you're hoping for will happen. I don't know if you'll get the relationship, the career, the fame, a business taking off. I don't know if the dream you have right now will be the dream you will even want five years from now. I do know this. You don't have to decide that it's too late simply because you haven't bloomed yet. You can look at where you are. You can ask what season you're in. You can ask what this season needs from you. Maybe I'm not in the right garden. Maybe it needs patience. Maybe it needs actions. Maybe it needs transplanting. Maybe it needs pruning. Maybe it needs rest. Maybe it needs help. Maybe it needs a completely different seed. Maybe you need to stop watering something you don't even want anymore. And maybe you're closer to spring than you think. The work you've been doing quietly has been preparing you for something you can't see yet. maybe you've been building roots, strengthening the soil, learning, and Maybe you've been becoming capable of handling the things you keep saying you're not ready for. And when it finally starts growing, it might look sudden. like you got lucky. It might look like everything happened overnight. You'll know. you'll know about the seasons nobody else saw. about the winter. the seeds that didn't take. things you had to prune. the things you had to let go. You'll know about the days. You almost stopped tending the garden altogether, and maybe that's the thing I want us to remember. A garden doesn't have to be blooming to be alive. Sometimes the most important work is happening underneath the surface, and maybe you're not too late. Maybe you're becoming rooted enough to bloom. Back to the question. Is it too late? Maybe. Maybe you should stop limiting yourself. I don't think you can know that simply because you haven't bloomed yet. Sometimes you're not too late. We're in a different season than we expected. Maybe we're planting, tending, pruning, harvesting, resting, or Maybe we're learning how to build something we can sustain. maybe we're discovering that we don't want the garden anymore. that's not a failure either. I think that's what I want to take away from all of this. stop looking at someone else's garden and using it to decide whether yours is growing fast enough or beautiful enough or has a great story. Stop confusing the work happening underneath the surface means that nothing is happening at all. Maybe before you decide that you're too late, ask yourself what season am I in? What does this season need from me? Does it need more effort, more patient, more protection, more help? Does something need to be prune? Does something need to be let go? Or maybe do you need to stop digging up the soil every five minutes to see if anything is growing? sometimes the roots are doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing. You can't see them. I think that's the part we forget. We want the flower, we want the harvest, we want the proof. We want someone to look at the garden and say, See, you made it, you did it. Maybe your job isn't to prove that you're on time. Maybe your job is to tend to the garden you actually are in. maybe you're not too late. Maybe you're still becoming rooted enough to bloom. And whether you leave me a comment, send me a message, or simply sit with this question yourself, I hope this conversation stays with you. Thank you for slowing down and thinking out loud with me. Until next time, take care of yourself. And remember, not blooming yet is not the same thing as never blooming. I'll see you in the next episode.