What I Wish I Knew About Time: A Love Letter to This Extraordinary, Unrepeatable Life

There is a moment that has been finding me lately, quietly and without warning, in the unhurried space between getting ready for the day and actually beginning it.

I stand at the mirror, and I look.

"How did it get so late so soon?" Dr Seuss

Not with the harsh, inventory-taking gaze I was taught. The one that scans for flaws and measures what is missing. But with something softer than that. Something that took me most of my life to find. A kind of slow, wondering tenderness toward the face looking back at me, this face I have carried through every season I have survived, every joy I almost missed, every love I held and every one I let go of and every single morning I was given that I didn’t always know was a gift.

The lines are there. I won’t pretend otherwise.

But they are not what I thought they would be when I was young and afraid of them. They are not evidence of loss. They are the most honest autobiography I have ever written. Stories pressed into skin, chapters I lived through that I didn’t know I was writing at the time, proof that I was here, that I felt things, that the weather of a full life moved across this face and I did not look away from any of it.

I am still learning what to make of that.

Here is something I have been sitting with, something that feels important and true and slightly bewildering in the most beautiful way:

I think my generation is doing something with age that has never quite been done before, and we don’t have a map for it yet because no one handed us one.

I think about my grandmother. When I was a child, she felt ancient to me in a way that seemed inevitable and permanent. The particular smell of BenGay and mothballs, the careful slowness of her movements, the sense that she had arrived at some final destination called “old” and had taken up residence there. I thought that was simply what age looked like. I thought that was what was coming for all of us.

She must have been in her 50s.

And I think about a conversation I had recently with a close friend, who told me that one of the things she loves most about this season of her life is that she goes to the house music club with her mother and that her grandmother still dances. These are women in their 70s and 80s, still moving, still showing up, still finding joy on a dance floor at midnight, still vibrant in a way that my childhood understanding of age simply had no category for.

Something has shifted. Something is genuinely different.

I think about the elders of hip-hop.

The men and women who were there at the beginning, who built something from nothing in the Bronx and Harlem and Compton and beyond, who handed the world a culture it has been living inside ever since. And I watch them now, older than me in years but somehow radiating the same creative fire, the same generative aliveness, the same sense of having more to say and more to give and more road still ahead of them.

Age, for us, is starting to feel less like a destination and more like a construct. Less like a wall and more like a river that keeps moving, keeps changing, keeps finding new shapes for itself.

I don’t entirely know what to do with that yet. But I know it matters.

What I do know is this: life moves faster than anyone warns you it will, and the warning, even when it comes, doesn’t land the way it needs to until you are standing somewhere in the middle of your own story looking back at the early chapters with a mixture of love and grief and the particular tenderness you can only feel for someone you used to be.

I remember 14 the way you remember a dream that felt completely real while you were inside it. The world felt too big and too small at the same time. My body was a storm I didn’t know how to live in. My heart was wild and untamed and so desperately, hungrily alive, reaching toward something I couldn’t name. I wanted to grow up so badly, wanted freedom and independence and the dignity of being taken seriously, and the wisdom of the people around me. The guidance my family offered, the gentle urgings to slow down, to stay young a little longer, to let the sweetness of that season be enough, felt like chains I needed to escape rather than gifts I was being handed.

I wish I could sit with that girl for just an afternoon.

I wish I could tell her that the freedom she was racing toward would still be there, that adulthood would arrive whether she sprinted toward it or not, that the homework and the laughter and the uncomplicated joy of not yet knowing how complicated everything would become. That those things were not obstacles between her and real life but were, in fact, the most real life she would ever get to live twice.

I would tell her to stay. Just a little longer. To let the dance be slow.

My 20s arrived and brought with them a heaviness I didn’t know how to name. I looked at the world and saw mostly what was broken in it, felt mostly what was untrustworthy about it, carried a heart full of dreams wrapped in a skepticism so thick it kept the dreams from breathing. I was suspicious of people’s motives before they had done anything to earn that suspicion. I was quick to see the shadow and slow to trust the light.

What I know now, and what I wish I had understood then, is that the nervous system I was living inside had been shaped by real experiences into real patterns of protection and that those patterns, as loyal and intelligent as they were, were costing me the very connections I was aching for. I was keeping people at a distance to stay safe, and the distance was its own kind of suffering.

I wish someone had found the words to tell me that what I focused on was what I would keep finding, not because the world was giving me what I deserved, but because the lens I looked through shaped what I was able to see. I wish I had known sooner that vulnerability was not a weakness to be overcome but the actual doorway into every real and lasting thing.

My 30s and 40s brought a different kind of reckoning.

I thought I had arrived. I thought I finally knew things. And in some ways I did. But there were still places inside me, tender and unexamined, where the old patterns were quietly running, where I was still giving my time and energy and the most generous parts of myself to people who were not always able to meet me there. Not because I didn’t know better, but because somewhere underneath the knowing, I still wasn’t entirely sure I deserved better.

I came across something recently that settled into me like a stone finding the bottom of still water: “people know when they are treating you poorly. They know when they are treating you less than you’re worth. But the truth is, they’re hoping you don’t know your worth.”

I had to sit with that for a long time.

Because what it named for me was not bitterness about what others had done, but a compassionate and clear-eyed accounting of where I had participated in my own diminishment. Every time I overlooked something that didn’t feel like love because I was afraid that naming it would cost me the relationship, every time I dimmed something in myself to make more room for someone else’s comfort, every time I confused loyalty with self-abandonment and called it love.

Self-worth, I now understand, is not something age delivers to you automatically, not something that accumulates like a pension you collect after enough years of showing up. It is something you choose, and keep choosing, and sometimes have to fight your own history to hold onto. And you don’t have to be halfway through a life to choose it. You don’t have to have lines on your face to know you are worthy of being loved well.

That is the gift I most want to hand forward.

Because here is what I am learning about this strange and unmapped territory of being a seasoned human in a world that is still figuring out what seasoned means:

We are not our grandmothers’ version of this age. We are not the culture’s version of it either. The version that quietly sidelines people once they have passed some invisible threshold of usefulness, that mistakes stillness for wisdom and equates aging with irrelevance.

We are something new.

We are the generation that built hip-hop and watched it become the most influential cultural force on the planet. We are the grandmothers still dancing at midnight. We are the elders who have decades of hard-won knowing in our bodies and still feel the creative fire burning, still have things to say and build and heal and offer. We are living proof that the old maps of what age looks like simply do not apply to us, and we are making new ones in real time, often without realizing that is what we are doing.

And I think that is worth pausing to honor.

Not with nostalgia. Not with grief about what youth was or wasn’t. But with a full-bodied, eyes-open appreciation for the particular and unrepeatable gift of being this alive, this knowing, this unfinished, at this exact moment in the story.

So this is my love letter to all of it. To the 14-year-old who wanted to grow up so badly, to the 20-something who armored her heart to survive, to the woman in her 30s and 40s who was still learning what she deserved, and to the person standing at the mirror now, tracing the lines of a life she is still in the middle of writing.

To you, wherever you are in your own story:

Don’t wait for age to teach you what presence is worth. Don’t wait for loss to show you how precious ordinary moments are. Don’t wait for the lines to appear before you decide that you are worthy of love that is full and generous and real.

Every moment is an opportunity to choose yourself. Every relationship is either giving you life or quietly taking it, and you are allowed to know the difference without guilt. Every season, even the hard ones, has been part of making you into something the world genuinely needs.

And this season….this gorgeous, bewildering, unmapped, still-dancing season is no exception.

You are not winding down. You are not becoming irrelevant. You are not your grandmother’s version of this age, and you are not the culture’s diminished idea of what it means to have lived long enough to know things.

You are, perhaps for the first time, exactly and completely yourself.

And that, beloved, is worth every single year it took to get here.

With love and gratitude and a deep bow to the journey

~Doc Rain & Nativ Elementz