I Thought I Had No Stories Yet

When I was in third grade, I read the Little House on the Prairie books for the first time and became completely obsessed with them. I loved those books so much that I decided right then and there that I was going to be a writer.

I can still picture myself sitting at one of those kidney bean shaped classroom tables, the kind where the teacher sat in the curve while the rest of us circled around pretending to understand math. I opened my journal fully intending to write stories about my own life the way Laura did.

About thirty seconds later I closed it again because I realized I didn’t have any stories yet.

I was eight years old. My biggest hardship at the time was probably being told to turn off cartoons and clean my room. There simply wasn’t much material there yet.

Then life happened.

Stories started arriving whether I wanted them or not. Some joyful, some painful, and some confusing enough that I’m still trying to untangle them decades later. My mother’s mental health declined, my father’s life — and by extension all of ours — changed in ways none of us expected, and like a lot of people, I spent years reacting to life instead of consciously building one.

You make decisions from fear, survival, low self worth, or simply because you’re too young to understand how much your circumstances are shaping you in real time.

For reasons I still don’t entirely understand, I never seriously pursued writing when I was younger, despite wanting to be a writer for as long as I can remember. Looking back, I think the answer is actually pretty simple: I didn’t believe in myself yet. Not fully. I had ideas, dreams, and instincts, but not the confidence to trust them.

And I think a lot of people live this way when they’re young. Not because they’re lazy or weak or incapable, but because sometimes life arrives early and rearranges everything before you’ve even figured out who you are.
Some people spend their twenties building careers and chasing dreams. Other people spend those same years surviving difficult families, raising children, navigating loss, working jobs they hate just to stay afloat, or trying to recover from things they were never properly equipped to handle in the first place.

Life does not hand everyone the same starting point.

So like many people, I got on the hamster wheel of adulthood instead. You work, pay bills, raise children, take care of people, survive heartbreaks, deal with losses, and keep telling yourself you’ll get around to your dreams later when there’s more time, more money, or less chaos.

Then one day you wake up and realize later arrived twenty years ago.

The strange thing about getting older, though, is that while your knees get worse and you suddenly care deeply about comfortable shoes, you also start understanding things you couldn’t possibly have understood when you were young.

For example:

Life goes by incredibly fast.

I know every older person says this and when you’re young it sounds ridiculous because one bad week at work feels like a decade. But trust me on this one. Eighteen turns into forty in about ten minutes. Then forty turns into sixty while you’re looking for your reading glasses and trying to remember why you walked into the kitchen.
One day you’re eating Taco Bell at 2 a.m. with absolutely no consequences whatsoever and the next you’re researching anti-inflammatory foods because your shoulder has been “acting up” since April.

Take care of your body.

Not because strangers on Instagram need to witness your fitness journey, but because future you is going to be deeply annoyed by present you. Stretch now while your body still cooperates willingly because one day you will injure yourself doing something deeply humiliating like sneezing, sleeping wrong, or reaching for a sock.
And once you pass a certain age, every injury becomes a story.
Nobody over 45 simply “pulls a muscle.” We all become Civil War veterans.
“Honestly, I’ve never been the same since the mulch incident of 2017.”

Save money.

I know this is the most boring advice imaginable, but financial stress can swallow your entire life whole. Also, every appliance in your house is apparently in a secret group chat coordinating its destruction. Your refrigerator, water heater, and car will all fail within the same three-week period while your dog develops a mysterious limp that somehow costs $4,000 to diagnose.
Money may not buy happiness, but it does buy options, and options become incredibly valuable when life inevitably gets weird.

Peace is underrated.