Everyone in my family found their thing.

You know the thing I mean — the calling, the lane, the answer to “and what do you do?” that comes out in one confident sentence. My parents had theirs. My siblings found theirs early and stayed, the way you stay in a good marriage. For years I watched this the way you watch other people dance when you don’t know the steps: admiring, slightly baffled, wondering what music they could hear that I couldn’t.

I kept waiting for my thing to arrive. I looked for it in jobs and courses and other people’s certainty. I read the books. I did the quizzes — I can tell you my enneagram number faster than my bank balance. And every time something didn’t become The Thing, I filed it quietly under evidence: further proof that I was behind, or lost, or had missed some crucial meeting where lives were handed out.

I turned fifty recently. And somewhere around that birthday, without ceremony, a different thought arrived and simply sat down at my table like it had always lived here: what if I was never lost? What if I was just on the scenic route — and the scenic route was never a detour from my life, but the actual road?

Look at what the long way round collected. I know how to sit with someone in a hard hour and not flinch. I know what light does at six in the evening and why a room feels wrong until you move one chair. I can read a person’s weather from across a kitchen. I know how to begin again, because I’ve had the practice. None of this fits in one confident sentence at a dinner party. All of it turns out to be the work I was doing while I thought I was doing nothing.

The women I most want to talk to know exactly what I mean. They’re the ones in the middle of everything — capable, caring, quietly wondering if everyone else got a map. They spent the so-called finding-yourself decades finding everyone else: children, parents, households, whole small civilisations run from a handbag. And now the world has the nerve to ask them what they’ve done with their potential.

Here’s what I want to say to them, and to you, and honestly to myself on the days I forget: arriving late to your own life is still arriving. The view from the scenic route is better. And the destination — I’m less and less convinced there ever was one. There’s just the road, and the company, and whether you remembered to look out the window.

I’m still figuring it out. I’ve stopped apologising for that. It turns out “still figuring it out” isn’t the opposite of wisdom — it might be the whole of it.

From the scenic route, with the window down —
Genevieve