Day 77: Validation Across the Nation

In that magical way that everything you need sometimes arrives unbidden, in the past three days I've come across three incredibly validating articles. Two of them happen to be about late bloomers and the other looks at creativity and depression.

The stuff on late bloomers was the most encouraging and it must be said that a thirty-two year old would be hard-pressed to call themselves a late bloomer in the world of literature, but I'm working on a theory that a marker of my generation is that all of us think we're late. We've all constructed a life checklist with items like Get Married and Start Meaningful Career and each of these items is date-stamped with an age like 25 or 30. I don't know where we've pulled these numbers from, perhaps our parents' lives, expectations or some amalgamation of cultural influences like Beverly Hills 90210, but most of the people I talk to in my age group think they are five to seven years behind.

The first article on late bloomers is from Psychology Today and this link only shows you a snippet, but the beautiful point of the article is this: we are now living 30 years longer than we did a century ago. "In light of our extended life span, it's worth confronting the very notion of late blooming to ask: late for what?" I think all of us should put a sign above our desks reading just that: LATE FOR WHAT?!

And then you follow that little confection up with a meatier take from The New Yorker that digs deep into cultural assumptions that if you haven't become famous by Lindsay Lohan's age (whatever that is) then it ain't gonna happen. The piece, written by Malcolm Gladwell – the Tipping Point guy – also goes into the different work styles of prodigies vs. late bloomers. Prodigies tend to work 'conceptually', puking out works of genius in one furious rush. Jonathan Safran Foer spent a total of three days in the village where his debut, award-winning novel, Everything is Illuminated, was set. He wrote the book's 300 pages in ten weeks. He was 19. Ben Fountain, age 48, traveled to Haiti over thirty times and spent years on his book, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. Fountain worked 'experimentally', enduring false starts, endless re-drafting and periods of dark frustration.

A story like Safran Foer's makes for better magazine copy and I'm wondering if that's why we tend to hear more about the prodigies and the I-wrote-it-in-four-minutes people. And, I'm not going to lie to you, a fresh-faced young person looks better in photos. (Which is really why I want to get famous sooner rather than saggier.)

I'm also wondering if these "conceptual" people have become the measuring stick that us "experimental" people measure ourselves against. Gladwell writes: "On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure." Yikes. Sounds depressing, but it does make me feel better about the fact that I'm working on the third attempt at this book and really, one should hang on to the 'on the road to great achievement' part anyway.

Speaking of depressing, the third article I found was one looking at depression and creativity. It's not a shocker they are connected. We hear stories of mad or suicidal artists all the live long day. But this study looked at the effect of self-reflective rumination on creativity and depression. Here's the full meal deal, but the Reader's Digest is this: artists (especially writers) who engage in self-reflective rumination, that is contemplation or reflection that can transform to brooding, are more likely to get depressed, but they are also more likely to be creatively productive. Ruminating on your emotions, memories, life events produces lots and lots of ideas, but it can also make you sad. AHA! Aha. Aha. Know thyself. Anything that makes me feel less crazy about being crazy is a good thing.