I am what you call a late bloomer. I didn't go to college until I was thirty-eight (that's how long it took me to get the courage). I didn't find my soul mate until I was forty-five (I had years of countless relationships and two failed marriages).

Today I turned 69, and I still haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up. That truth has yet to be revealed to me.

At a time when most women my age are bouncing their grandkids on their knees, I never got around to having kids - I chose to have 5 dogs instead. You could say that I've been in a perpetual state of my own birthing–eagerly anticipating the birth of ME.

Throughout the decades, I’ve experienced countless false alarms--times when I've been absolutely sure and convinced that I had found my "thing" only to discover that my "thing" just wasn't quite right. Could it be that I’m just fickle and picky? But the truth is, my interests are wide and varied, and I have a low threshold for boredom.

False alarms can be exhausting for pregnant women--that’s what my mom told me because she experienced many of them when she was pregnant with me. Apparently, there were weeks of going back and forth from home to the hospital, only to be disappointed that I wasn't quite ready to reveal myself to the world.

And it's been no less exhausting for me on my own journey. I've often thought that I could have saved myself a lot of bother if I had just settled for something... anything.

There'd be no more second-guessing myself, no more agonizing about who I am and what I'm meant to do in the world. No more purging what disagrees with me, no more agony of leaving the security of good paying jobs. No more drifting from this to that. No more crying on my bed in a fetal position wondering why I can't be like other people and figure this thing out.

But in spite of all of that, getting myself to settle for less has never been an option for me. I’ve left many good-paying jobs and relationships when I knew they weren’t a good fit. If your shoes don’t fit why walk in them? The soul wants what it wants, in the same way that the sun just has to shine.

Once you find yourself pregnant, the child has to be born. It's just a matter of time. And in the same way, we each have our own incubation time of figuring out what wants to be born.

Some of us just take longer than others. Besides, there’s an upside to taking a long and winding path. With age comes wisdom, creativity, confidence, and self-awareness.

As I look back on all of those years of trying this and trying that, one could say that I lack commitment and decisiveness,. but what's really been going on, what I've really been trying to do all of these years (and continue to do) is to find ALIGNMENT with who I really am.

So, for all you late bloomers out there - it’s never too late to become your true self.

Is anyone else out there a late bloomer?