You never really believe you’re going to make it.

You’d like to be somewhere else. You’d like something to be different. You want to lose sixty pounds. You want to build a business. You want to learn a language, or learn an instrument — maybe bass guitar, that’s a good one to learn. And you look at it and think: there’s no way. I don’t have the time. I’m not a kid anymore. Hell, I’m not even thirty anymore. It looks impossible. It looks so far away.
And if you’re like me, it’s not just that the thing is hard and would take a long time. It’s that you’re not really sure you can do it at all. That’s a different problem. Time you can sometimes find. Confidence in yourself is harder.

I talk to people like that all the time. They see my band play and afterward they come up and say, gosh, I always wanted to learn guitar, but I never did. And I tell them every time — it’s not too late. It’s not too late to learn whatever instrument you want to learn. I don’t know how many people I’ve actually gotten through to. But I believe it. I really do.

It’s easy to say it to someone else. It’s hard to look at yourself and believe the same thing.

But I have to remember something. Almost fourteen years ago, I was forty-four years old, caught out in active addiction. The only reason I wasn’t homeless was that my landlord hadn’t kicked me out yet, and the only reason for that was that he was getting foreclosed on. I didn’t even know that at the time. I woke up every day mad I wasn’t dead. I didn’t think I’d ever get out of it.

But I did. I asked for help. I got into treatment, got involved in Narcotics Anonymous, and I’ve stayed clean since July 11, 2012. One day at a time.
That was the thing. One day at a time. In the beginning, I didn’t feel great. It took a long, long time before I could stand on my own two feet emotionally. It’s still a work in progress, honestly. But it’s a lot better than it was.

And here’s the part I want to land on, because this is really what this is about.

If you’d shown me back in 2012 what my life would look like now, I wouldn’t have believed it. When I got into recovery, I didn’t really think I could stay clean. And worse than that, I didn’t think I could ever be happy or have a normal life. I really thought I’d broken something. I didn’t think I could ever work again. I didn’t think I’d ever really do normal stuff.
But none of that was true.

What I did have, in the beginning, was other people. I found people who’d felt the way I felt, and had gotten out of where I was. That was the evidence I had. Not my own evidence — borrowed evidence. It worked for them. Maybe it might work for me. Maybe I might be able to get to where they were.

I still follow some of those people, because they’re at a more serene place than I am. And I look around now and there are people looking at me, not believing they can get where I am. They can. I wish I could shake them and make them believe it, but that’s not how it works. They have to do what I did — borrow some evidence, and then start producing their own.

That’s what happened to me. Little by little, I stayed clean, and I started to get better. I started to be able to handle life. And now I have that evidence. I know I can do things like that. I know it takes time. I wish it didn’t take so much time, but I know it does.
And here’s where I have to be honest with you, because otherwise this turns into one of those motivational pep talks I don’t have a lot of patience for.

Even with all that evidence, it’s still hard for me to apply the same lesson to the other things in my life I want to change. I have proof. I have a pile of it. And I still find myself looking at something new I want to do and telling myself I can’t, or it’s too late, or I’m not the kind of person who does that. The evidence is right there and I still don’t always trust it.
So I’m not writing this as somebody who’s figured it out. I’m writing it as somebody who keeps having to remember it.

But the lesson is real, and I think it holds for you too. You’ve already done it. Somewhere in your life there’s something that looked hard, looked impossible, and you did it anyway. Maybe you got sober. Maybe you raised a kid. Maybe you got out of a bad relationship, or a bad job, or a bad version of yourself. Whatever it is — that counts. It’s evidence. It belongs on the scale against whatever you’re looking at right now and telling yourself it’s too late for.

It’s not too late. It’s just not going to go as fast as you want it to.

And in the meantime, do what I did. Find people who’ve done the thing you’re trying to do. Borrow their evidence. Let it carry you long enough that you start producing your own.
That’s how it works. That’s the only way I’ve ever seen it work.