The Blank Page and the Second Act

According to the tables they print in the back of financial brochures, I should be winding down.

I should have taken up water coloring or miniature golf by now. I should be someone who looks at her calendar on a Tuesday morning and sees nothing more pressing than a dental cleaning and a coupon for early-bird soup. Society has a very tidy script for women of a certain vintage: step politely out of the center lane, keep your opinions gentle, and let the younger folks handle the heavy lifting.

Instead, I wake up at dawn, feed a houseful of animals who think they run the place, manage a full household, and then sit down in front of a blinking cursor to figure out how a fictional investigator is going to survive an ancient evil in southeast Texas.

I have written six books. I host a weekly podcast. I talk to myriads of people about what goes bump in the night.

Every single time I open a new document to start a project, that same small, familiar voice leans in and whispers: “Who do you think you are to start this now? Aren’t you tired? Haven’t you done enough?”

The answer to whether I am tired is usually yes. But the answer to whether I am finished is an absolute no.

We have bought into a terrible lie that purpose has an expiration date, and that creative fire is the exclusive property of twenty-somethings who haven’t accumulated a single ache in their joints yet. We treat aging like a slow, apologetic surrender of ground.

Let me tell you what nobody tells you about starting something big in the second half of life: you are actually much better equipped for it now than you ever were back then.

At twenty-five, you have plenty of energy, but you don’t know who you are yet. You are terrified of what strangers think of you. You write to impress, build a business to prove a point, or panic the minute a storm blows through because you haven’t lived through enough weather to know the sun comes back.

When you sit down at a blank page after forty years of life’s real curriculum—after you’ve raised babies, buried parents, endured hospital waiting rooms, weathered financial crashes, and survived heartbreaks that nearly took you to your knees—you bring an army to the desk with you. You bring grit. You bring perspective. You bring the quiet, unshakeable knowledge that a bad day isn’t the end of the world, because you’ve seen worse and God carried you through every inch of it.

Wisdom is heavy, but it fits better than youth ever did.

A blank page is terrifying whether it’s a manuscript, a new business idea, a canvas, or simply deciding to finally write that cookbook your grandchildren keep asking for. It asks you to risk looking foolish. It asks you to admit that you still have something inside you that needs to come out.

If you’re sitting on a dream because your birthday candles tell you it’s too late, do me a favor: throw that calendar out the window. God does not consult an actuarial table to decide when He is done using you. Moses was eighty when his real job started.

Your past wasn’t a waste of time; it was the research. Everything you have lost, learned, loved, and endured was simply preparation for what you have to say now.

So go buy the notebook. Register for the class. Open the document. The blank page isn’t an accusation of what you haven’t done yet—it’s an invitation.

You’re not running out of time. You’re just finally ready to begin.

Mary Ann Poll is the author of the six-book Ravens Cove Iconoclast series and the host of Real Ghost Chatter, a weekly podcast of true supernatural stories. She lived in Alaska for more than forty years and now writes from Texas. Find her books and her podcast at maryannpoll.com.