Fifty-Five, on the Outside

You realize that people have been giving you the benefit of the doubt all these years, grading you on a curve. A curve called “potential.”

Potential to further refine your skills and harness your talent.

Potential to use your advantages as a springboard—or at least, a stepping stone.

Potential to mellow out, to lighten up, to wise up, to start favoring the better angels of your nature.

Potential to do something great and thus to justify all the things you do that aren’t good.

(Or, potential to give up on doing something great, thus freeing up time to do more good.)

And you begin to realize—slowly, over these middle years—that no one is grading you on a curve anymore, no matter how optimistically you still regard yourself. You are George Blanda now.

People are taking you (or leaving you) for what you actually are, how you actually behave, what you actually do and what you actually provide. Do your kicks go through the goalposts, or don’t they?

What’s more, you realize people have been judging you that way for quite some time now.

And you probably should start judging yourself the same way, kid.

But it’s hard, when you still feel like this a lot of the time.