Too Late :

‘’Sometimes you move forward by inches.

Sometimes everything feels too late. ‘’

Too late to study for that test, too late to write that paper, too late to get that degree, to lose weight, to build muscle, to get married, to have children, to not get married, to not have children. Too late to learn to play the cello, to go to medical school, to apply for a Fulbright, to have the career and home and travels somebody else seems to have, to make that film, write that book, paint that painting.

In my line of work, so many people go silent and slink away because they are late — too late, they think. I wish there were a way to let them know, “Find your way to me, I will help you. Whatever nothing you have done, let me show you how to turn it into a little bit of something. Whatever your littlest bit of something is, let me show you how to make it a little more.”

Too late is a liar, one of the most paralyzing and terrible of them all. If it has a drop of ink, it will smear it in your eyes so it looks like everything is covered with it, and now nothing is possible. Your life looks to you like a wasteland filled with ash heaps of missed opportunities, hopeless tasks, squandered talent and time. And with time we go into the depression.

What Is Depression For?

What could this feeling be good for? Why is it here? Why am I in this black place? So many of our species spend time here: it must offer something to the herd.
It is a lens that makes my arrogant and disdainful self earnest and humble. You heroin addicts and alcoholics who were self-medicating what I feel, who hit bottom and came back up, clawed their way toward normal, you seem to me heroic. You do. I want the perseverance and the will that you have. A young woman with OCD and emetophobia, coping bravely and openly with her workday during flu season and every day: heroic. I want the courage and resilience that you have.
From this place I see your epic struggle. I offer you my admiration.  You think that no one sees how hard you work, but I see.

I sing of arms and the man, he who, exiled by fate,

first came from the coast of Troy to Italy, and to

Lavinian shores – hurled about endlessly by land and sea,

by the will of the gods, by cruel Juno’s remorseless anger,

long suffering also in war, until he founded a city

–Virgil, The Aeneid, Book I, trans. A. S. Kline

You too are the hero of the Aeneid. Long suffering, hurled about endlessly, you found your cities in your way, invisible to many but not to me: I sing of warfare and a man at war, as Fitzgerald’s translation has it.  And Virgil, he sees what you did there. The Aeneid is of you and for you too.