Early Bloomer

Photo by peter bucks on Unsplash

I’ve come across the phrase “late bloomer” a few times recently, and I noticed I resisted it. I was an early bloomer, or what is more often called a precocious child. I had my first existential crisis when I was five. I can still remember crying in bed, my mum trying to figure out what I could possibly have to cry about. I was thinking that evening about how my grandfather died and how my parents will die someday, and I’ll be left alone, and then I’ll die too. I got my period at the age of twelve when everyone else was still playing hopscotch. I was a head taller than all the girls—and boys—in year six.

But I also started my graduate degree when I was twenty-six, which is late by North American standards. By the time I was doing my PhD, I was closer in age and in life stage to my supervisor than my labmates. This had more to do with moving across the ocean than with what I was ready for. Then I switched to writing fiction when I was thirty-seven. What do I make of that? An early mid-life crisis? Or just being late to figuring myself out?

Or maybe none of the above. Maybe blooming isn’t an event. As much as I love being attuned to the seasons, we aren’t flowers. We don’t bloom once and then die. We bloom in different domains, on different clocks, shaped by predispositions, place, culture, and where life takes us. My annoyance with the phrase, I think, comes down to this: the binary flattens our lives into a single event.