My 66th birthday was this week. Instead of a party, I gave myself an assignment. Every time the sentence “it’s too late” showed up in my head, and at this age it shows up a lot, I wrote it down and argued the case. What I found surprised me. This isn’t the tidy, you’ve-still-got-it birthday essay. It’s a real ledger, raw and personal, about visibility, my body, my mother, reinvention. Verdict by verdict. Read it, then write your own. I dare you. —Susan
Three words I put on trial. Some verdicts I saw coming. One I didn’t.
It’s too late.
A sentence three words long that has talked me out of doing more than any person could. It’s an innocuous cluster of little words that can wield great power over a life. At first, it can arrive cloaked as wisdom or a gentle warning. Other times, it shows up as an easy, respectable escape route when I’m tired or scared.
But notice who taught us this sentence.
“It’s too late” rarely starts with us. By the time we hit our sixth, seventh, eighth decades, the seeds of self-doubt have been planted everywhere we go and in everything we touch. It’s the doctor who stops listening. The boardrooms that don’t want our pitches. The runway at New York Fashion Week and the glossy pages of Vogue signaling that our relevance has an expiration date. We inherit the line and then repeat it on command, so the world doesn’t have to do the dirty work for us.
And the feelings underneath those words are real. The grief is earned. The arithmetic of how much runway is left wakes me at 3 a.m. Around every birthday, I feel all of it, even dwell on it. Does that make me weaker or stronger? I honestly don’t know.
I turned 66 this week. As a project, because apparently I needed one more, I spent time writing the sentence down every time it showed up and then argued with it on paper. Some of those arguments I lost, fairly. I discovered that there are things it’s genuinely too late for, and I’m willing to admit those, because sometimes it is, in fact, exactly that late.
Somewhere over the last year I started noticing that “it’s too late” isn’t one sentence, it’s many. The easiest pattern to identify is the plain fact. I can’t be 21 again, (nor do I want to be). No amount of self-awareness reopens that door. A more subtle case presents as a hedge, a way to back out without having to say, “I don’t want this enough.” I won’t get a new puppy, for example.
And sometimes, and this is the dangerous case, it’s advice someone else hands you that’s decisive for your life and free for theirs. “You should leave him. You should move closer to the kids.” Easy verdicts to dish out when you’re not the one who must live with the consequences.
While I spent time working these out, was I calling a choice a fact because the fact was easier to forgive? The truth is that most of them are choices. The trick is knowing which kind of “too late” you’re holding before you believe it.
Here’s my ledger.
Visibility and Being Seen
I tell myself that nobody wants to see or listen to a 66-year-old with forehead wrinkles and sagging knees stand at the podium or appear on their screen. It’s easier to assume that they’d rather see the 30-something with the shiny pitch deck and the five-inch Jimmy Choos.
Here’s what that voice never accounts for: the 30-something doesn’t have my life experience or my wisdom. She hasn’t moved 33 times, started five companies, or launched a public platform at 65.
I’ve never felt invisible because I’m loud and confident. I know how to take up space. But I do feel vulnerable sometimes that I might be “past my prime.” On camera, I see the age spots on my face, feel the wear and tear on my body, and I wonder how they’ll be read.
THE VERDICT: It’s not too late. I might even be early. I’m just getting to the good part. And I’m betting that the culture is finally warming up to older women taking center stage, being loud, and claiming the space we’ve spent a lifetime fighting for.
Body, Health, and Weight
Is it too late to be content with the way your body looks and with the natural aging process? For 50 years, I’ve lost and gained the same 40 pounds. Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing I could win the battle. There’s the private math, and then there’s the moral weight that culture piles onto an actual number. A doctor tells me my BMI is too high, and deep inside it lands as a verdict on my character, a failure I’m pressed to carry to the bitter end.
Am I giving up? Should I stop caring, and why do I care? Are they even the right reasons? For decades, I believed my body was a flaw. A willpower problem. A moral failing. But I’m starting to understand that maybe it was never about willpower and had nothing to do with discipline—and never did.
Which means those 50 years of self-contempt were spent on something I didn’t actually have to own. There’s not much I can do about the speed of the aging process, but my body positivity, my weight story, and my outlook have changed.
THE VERDICT: It’s not too late. And the surprise isn’t that the pounds have finally come off; it’s that the shame was the lie. I paid for it for almost 50 years before I realized it wasn’t really mine to carry.
Healing and Emotional Growth
Sometimes I tell myself it’s too late to reconcile with my mother. She’s been gone for 15 years. She never told me she loved me, not in a way I could keep, and something in me hardened around that absence. So what is there to reconcile? She’s gone. There’s no one on the other end. Yet, I’m the one left here with my thoughts.
I keep having the conversation with myself every night before I go to bed. I read PROVOKED messages and essays, and I find her in them—a whole generation of women who suffered in silence. And then another generation, like mine, raised by mothers who were drowning in their own storms. Women who didn’t have the language or the mental health to say the thing. That was my mother exactly.
It doesn’t fix it. I’m not even sure, at this point, that I want it fixed. Some days the pain has eased with time, and I think about her more gently than I used to. Maybe that’s the reconciliation I’ve been looking for—not a dramatic closing scene but a reluctant acceptance.
THE VERDICT: This is an open item. It will never be fully closed. But I’m not in as much pain as I was a decade ago—and that, for now, is enough.
Identity Shifts and Reinvention
Is it too late to pick up, leave a partner, move someplace where you know nobody, or do something equally radical? I don’t ask that question hypothetically. I’ve moved more than 33 times. My last move was just two years ago, at 64, when we came to our current home, where I barely knew anyone.
We moved to be closer to our kids and to give me space for a big reinvention. To ask myself, honestly: If I had one last creative pivot left in me, what might it be? My reinvention wasn’t becoming someone new. It was recognizing who was already there—the writer and the builder. Launching PROVOKED at 65 wasn’t a new me. It was an older, wiser one. The move opened something up for my husband too. It gave him a chance to reflect and make a significant change. Not surprising that our almost 50 years together had led us here—doing different things but doing it in step together.
I’m certain that it’s never too late to reinvent yourself. But be careful, because the world sells women our age two opposite stories at once—accept yourself exactly as you are, and also here’s a new face, a new city, a new life to try on. You can’t win at both. Here’s the lesson I offer: Ask yourself the honest question: Is this coming from knowing myself, or from being tired or bored? Big life decisions—moving, remarrying, blowing up a relationship—have consequences. You’re the one who has to live with those consequences.
THE VERDICT: It’s absolutely not too late to reinvent yourself. Shift your energy toward something that serves you better, that protects you, that heals you. Follow that energy, but make sure it’s yours.
Breaking Out the Good Stuff
There’s another category of “too late” that doesn’t get talked about enough: the everyday joys and unapologetic pleasures we keep postponing.
Is it too late to break out the good stuff?
Wear the heirloom jewelry your mother or grandmother left you, not just for weddings, but on a regular Tuesday. Stop saving the “nice stuff” for special occasions, as if you have infinite time. Buy yourself the thing you’ve been dreaming about your whole damn life. Dress for the life you want now.
If not now, when? If not me, who?
That’s what I told myself when I started PROVOKED. That’s how I’ve lived my life.
Closing: The Dare
What if your best chapter is still to come?
We’ve been told that our biggest moments arrive early: marriage, career, children, the first big job, the “peak” version of our younger bodies. When those milestones are behind us or didn’t unfold the way we were promised, we start to believe it’s too late.
But what about the experience we can lean into now? That’s the flex.
Only you get to decide if there’s more, if it is, in fact, too late, or if this is precisely the right time to do the thing. The move. The business. The breakup. The attempt at healing. The joy you’ve been deferring.
My verdict? It’s too late for certain facts. It’s not too late for the choices that matter. And in many cases, “too late” is simply fear talking.
Go ahead. I dare you. Wear the diamond brooch. Write your own verdicts. And when you hear that three-word sentence in your head next time, stop long enough to ask:
Is it too late?
Or have I finally reached the moment I get to decide?
