Forty-eight years. If I were really to write them all down, how long would it take? I thought about that for a long time. Then I realized—it doesn't actually have to be very long.
I was eight when I first discovered that a life, once written onto paper, could make someone stop for a moment and linger over it.
At eighteen, when I understood little about what the future might hold, I thought my life was only just beginning. I imagined a long, long road stretching out before me. I believed I could be the master of my own fate, that I could decide for myself who I wanted to become.
At twenty-four, I graduated from university and began working. I entered the bewildering chaos of the adult world and learned how to survive.
Back then, I moved faster than most people. Every day, I rushed to work, rushed to meet clients, rushed to make sales, rushed to accomplish one impossible thing after another. I was always in a hurry to prove that I was capable, always trying to become that person others would look at and think: She is worth something.
Then came my thirties, and life seemed to turn into another dead end. A failed marriage and family life. A career that somehow became a career when perhaps it was never meant to. The same days repeating themselves in an endless cycle I could neither understand nor escape. There seemed to be so little happiness in my life. I became weary of it. Saddened by it. And slowly, deeply disappointed by the life I was living.
Year after year passed. Partners changed. Feelings faded. Job titles changed. Offices changed. I met more and more people, yet fewer and fewer remained beside me.
Slowly, I began to understand. Some people are only meant to walk with you for part of the journey. Some things once felt so devastating that I truly believed the sky was falling. Years later, I could barely remember the details. Some things I had wanted desperately—I eventually got. But by the time they were mine, they no longer brought me the happiness I had imagined. And some people and things I once believed I could never lose simply stayed behind one day, on an otherwise ordinary afternoon, while life carried me forward.
By forty, I began opening the doors to the rooms inside myself and looking back more often. Not because I longed to be young again. I simply wanted to know: Where had I gone all these years?
I had given such a large part of my life to work. On countless mornings, I dragged myself out of sleep when every part of me wanted to remain there, then got up and chased after life again. I could no longer count the meetings I had attended. I could not remember how many times I had buried myself in work, or how many emails I had written.
There had been so many things I worried about, became angry over, and lost sleep because of. Looking back now, none of them matters anymore.
But there is someone I choose to remember. The eight-year-old girl who loved putting her life and her dreams onto paper. The girl who had nothing but dreams. No corporate title to protect. No résumé weighing her down. No idea who she was supposed to become. She only knew one thing: Writing made her happy.
Somewhere along the way, I left her very far behind. And I left her there for many years. Then, at forty-eight, I suddenly wanted to go back and find her. I don't want to live my life all over again. I have no desire to walk the roads I walked in my twenties once more. Nor do I need to revisit the wounds of my thirties just to prove that I could survive them. I have simply come to understand this:
Life does not become nothing but memories once we reach a certain age. Some things can begin at forty-eight. And that is all right.
So I began writing again.
So I began writing again. If the first piece isn't good, that's all right. If no one reads it, that's all right too. I don't even know where this road will eventually take me.
But this time, I did not ask myself: "Is it too late to begin?"
I asked only: "If I don't begin today, how many more years am I willing to wait?" And the answer was simple. I don't want to wait anymore. If I had to reduce forty-eight years of my life to just a few words, perhaps I would say this: I spent many years trying very hard to become the adult everyone expected me to be.
And after travelling such a long way, I decided to come back— to find the eight-year-old girl who first began to write, take her by the hand, and walk away with her again.
Written by Dian Xi Wei
12 September, 2026
