Embarrassed. Until…

There was never a race to begin with. I just didn't know that yet.

I was embarrassed that I was starting over in my 50s. Embarrassed. Like I'd missed some deadline everyone else got the memo on. Turns out nobody was thinking about it but me.

Doesn't matter if it's a layoff, a divorce, or life just throwing you a curveball, a lot of us end up starting over later than we planned. Not because we did something wrong. Because life happened. And somewhere in there, we start feeling like we're behind.

Here's what I figured out. I wasn't embarrassed because of my age. I was embarrassed because I still had this idea in my head that life is a race, and I was checking my timing against everyone else's. That's it. That's the whole problem. It was never the starting over. It was the comparing.

And once I saw that, I realized something else. Most people aren't thinking about my situation at all. They're thinking about theirs. Everybody's staring at their own race. Nobody's watching yours as closely as you think they are.

What changed for me wasn't my circumstances. It was peace. Peace of knowing I'm in charge of my own thoughts and my own feelings. The race, the comparing, the whole idea that I was behind, that was never real. I made it up. It was all in my head.

Once I let go of that, starting over didn't feel like starting over anymore. It just felt like starting.

So if you're starting again right now, at 30, 40 or 50, whatever age you're at, you're not behind. There was never a race to begin with. You're just on your own timeline. And that's enough.

Watch the full video here.