Doree Shafrir - Thanks for Waiting: The Joy (& Weirdness) of Being a Late Bloomer

I recently came across an email inviting people to my thirtieth birthday party. I wasnt taken aback by the location (a karaoke studio in Manhattans Koreatown) or the guest list (practically everyone Id ever met), but I was shocked by the start time: ten p.m . I tweeted about it, writing, Truly was I ever so young?

The responses surprised me. My friend Caroline wrote, My 30th birthday started at 5 p.m. and it was on a Monday and my invitation clearly stated, I am leaving the bar and going home at 7 p.m . Another woman said hers started at noon. Yet anotherwho has a baby almost exactly my sons age but is ten years younger than mesaid, I was literally never that young.

And then it hit me. Thirty was old to have a late birthday party! But how had everyone else gotten these parties out of their systems when they were twenty-four, if theyd ever had them at all? Meanwhile, on the night I turned thirty, I was blissfully shrieking into a microphone, drunk on cheap beer and too-strong vodka sodas in plastic cups. I wasnt engaged or married or pregnant. I lived in a small basement apartment. I had a job, but less than a year before, I had been an intern.

At the time, not having achieved any of the milestones I associated with being an adult didnt bother me, but as my early thirties turned into my midthirties and then my late thirties, I started to feel like I had been left behind, that everyone elses lives had moved on and progressed, and I was still the female Peter Pan singing a slightly off-key version of Mariah Careys We Belong Together (deceptively tough karaoke song; still brings down the house every time). For men, theres just not as much pressure to do things on a timeline; the image of the man who takes an especially long time to find himself is one that has long been enshrined, even venerated, in our collective cultural consciousness.

But most women arent afforded the luxury of doing things on their own time. The paradox of femininity is that were always either too young and inexperienced, or too old and washed up. As my friend Maris Kreizman once put it on Twitter: Youre told youre young until you turn 35. By the time youre 40 youre over the hill. I had no idea at the time that I would only have 5 years to be the age when I was just a person.

Statistics do, in fact, point to the late thirties as being this turning point, where suddenly, more of your friends will be married, own homes, and have kids. So for those of us who dont hit that trifectawhat then? What if we want those things, but they just havent happened for us, for whatever reason? Or if we dont want those things, but we feel like we should?

Ive wrestled with all these questions. I got married at thirty-eight, had my first kid at forty-one, and undoubtedly will be renting in the very overpriced city of Los Angeles until the end of time. I also feel like I very much did not have my shit figured out at thirty, or forty. Even now, at forty-four, Im still figuring it out, whatever it is.

Long after my thirtieth birthday party, I realized that I always had been, and probably always would be, lateto dating, to sex, to marriage, to motherhood, to finding the kind of work I truly like to do, to being comfortable in my own skin. And so I wanted to write this book as a gentle corrective to the idea that were supposed to do things on a schedule. Im only just becoming the person I was meant to beand that took a lot of self-reflection and more than a little reckoning with the person I have always been. (And to be clear, that person is still a work in progress.)

But this book is not just about coming to terms with being a late bloomer; its also about how I came to deeply appreciate it. Because sometimes coming-of-age happens on our own timeand thats okay.