Official Site of Doyle Manderley

I’m online a lot for someone who is 1) old enough to have not had internet as a kid and 2) employed full-time. I’ve noticed, lately, that there are a lot of young folks online wondering if their train has sailed; if it’s too late for them to try something new, to break into something. I’m almost 30, they lament. I haven’t published my novel/cured cancer/prepared the perfect souffle/made it in Hollywood/become famous etc. etc. etc.

You don’t realize how young you are when you’re still in your 20s. I didn’t. When I was 29, I thought things were as good as they were going to get, and I was a dingus. My achievements weren’t enough. I was already too old to be young.

Now, two decades later, my 20s feel like they happened to someone else, and I sometimes still worry about whether it’s too late to try.

Because I’ve been saying “I’m gonna write a novel!” since I was in junior high. My path as a youth (a yoot?) was going to be in publishing, and writing, and editing, and books. My college experience took me there. And then, I didn’t. I started to, but I didn’t. And 11-year-old Doyle, still deep down inside, wept and wept.

And look, I’ve achieved plenty. I’m thankfully, finally, past the point where I think I’ve got nothing because I never became a novelist. I have a career and a marriage and a dog and all that shit. The career is not the dream career, and often it feels impossible to unhook myself from it because of obligation and late-stage capitalism and all that.

But here’s the thing.

The dream remained. I continued writing into my 30s and 40s, short stories and half-baked, half-finished novel drafts. I won some prizes, had some short stories published where no one would find them. I took months away from writing, sometimes; years. But I always came back to it. I still wanted it.

And now, here I am, on the downhill side of middle age, and I’m trying again.

Where am I going with this? Fuck if I know. But I do hope someone sees this who needed to see it and feels a little better about being “too late”. I won’t say it’s never too late; sometimes you just miss the fucking bus. I’m certain it’s too late for me to become an American Gladiator.

But being older doesn’t mean you’re in the event horizon and you can’t fix your trajectory. Everything that’s happened to you up to this point has made you who you are today, and if the thing hasn’t been achieved yet, then maybe you weren’t ready for the thing until now. A wise shrink once told me that we’re all works in progress, no matter how old we get (and he was old).

And I still wanted it, even when I took breaks or tried to tell myself I was an asshole for thinking I could have it. And so I let myself progress, let my souffle rise (gross). Sure, some people’s souffles are nice and poofy well before 40, those people are not me. I’m a wad of frozen dough, and I needed to thaw out.

Enough bread metaphors (breadaphors).

Yes, I know souffles are not bread. I needed a reason to use “breadaphors”. It’s an old trick we in the biz like to call “shoehorning”.

Keep learning and trying, little souffles.

DM