Few articles feel more brazenly sadistic than the dreaded “30 under 30” list. For those of us who have spent years either spinning our wheels professionally, or trying to figure out what we even want to do in the first place, being presented with a list of revolutionary app-developing, industry-disrupting, six-figure-book-deal-receiving Ivy league alum wunderkinds is the emotional equivalent of being forced to watch the entire “Saw” franchise with your eyes taped open.

Given the culture’s obsession with youth, especially within creative industries, it’s not uncommon to worry about an invisible window of opportunity closing at some arbitrary age. This was a very real fear for TV writer Danielle Henderson, 40, who didn’t have a concrete idea of what she wanted her career to look like until her mid-to-late 30s.

“I felt like if I didn’t achieve things at a certain point, the opportunity was lost to me forever,” Henderson said. “It’s like I’m 29, I haven’t done anything. I haven’t written my first book, I haven’t broken out like I’m some J. T. LeRoy. There was nothing about my life that was worthwhile. And all you do is keep reading about people who do things at 18 and 20. I felt lost.”

Although Henderson has written for such shows as Hulu’s Difficult People, HBO’s Divorce, and the forthcoming Cary Fukunaga Netflix series Maniac, she didn’t see the inside of a writers room until she was 38.

“My resume reads like I was on the run from the law,” Henderson joked about the seemingly endless stream of book store, bakery, and coffee shop jobs she held in New York, California, and even Anchorage, Alaska. “Most of my career has been about survival. It wasn’t uncommon for me to have to sell CDs just to buy a movie ticket after I paid all my bills.”

Henderson returned to college at 30 and then entered a master’s program at 34, but fortunately she hated it. I say fortunately because she channeled that misery into creating the profoundly funny blog Feminist Ryan Gosling. After that became a legitimate viral phenomenon, she pursued a freelance gig recapping TV shows for Vulture. Among the fans of her recaps were talent agents who recognized that she was hilarious and reached out to convince her to start writing for TV instead of about it.

“I was 37 at that point. It took me a year and a half, and my agents at UTA worked with me to write a great spec script I could start shopping around,” Henderson said. “I was now moving towards something, I was finally moving towards a goal for the first time.”

Finally having a concrete professional goal in mind gave Henderson a clarity and focus she had been missing for most of her adult life. Prior to linking up with her agents, Henderson had thought about trying to write for television and reached out to writers she was acquainted with on Twitter to find out how they did it and the advice was she received ranged from “join a sketch comedy troupe” to the more nebulous “just move to L.A. and meet other writers.” Now she had a tangible plan, which entailed learning how to write a script and actually writing that script.

There’s a thread connecting the majority of the self-described late-bloomers in this story. Most of them discuss a feeling of not knowing what they wanted to do with their lives well into adulthood or spent years dreaming of a certain career they didn’t think was possible. Some of them spent years in what they assumed would be a rewarding and fulfilling career, only to find themselves desperately looking for an escape hatch years after the fact. It turns out that uncertainty and ambivalence weren’t flaws, but opportunities for them to get to know themselves and try new things. For some, it’s better to figure out what you want to do when you’re more settled and mature rather than to dive headfirst into a rigid career path straight out of high school only to realize at 35 that you hate being a lawyer, or banker, or accountant.

Like Henderson, Jes Skolnik to make a major pivot at age 37 by ditching a miserable temp job working for “a human gaslight” at a medical supply company in the Chicago suburbs to accept a dream job as managing editor at Bandcamp Daily, combining two lifelong loves of music and writing. Prior to that, Skolnik, now 38, was working at a record store and a pizza shop and juggling those gigs with freelance writing after getting laid off from a contract writing job at a labor union.

“In my 20s I was blogging, doing zines, and writing for myself as a side thing,” said Skolnik, who is intersex and prefers the pronouns they and them. “Even though my career seems like it’s really all over the place, it’s not. My skills have been building to where I am now.”

Skolnik was active in the punk scene since they were a teenager and cultivated a network of friends and acquaintances who admired their writing and encouraged them to pursue it professionally. In addition to writing about music for the likes of Pitchfork, they also wrote deeply personal essays about surviving sexual assault and domestic abuse for outlets like BuzzFeed and the New York Times.

“People would tell me my career came out of nowhere when I was doing stuff in the underground like playing in bands, putting out records, and writing zines for 20 years,” Skolnik said. “I have had music male critics in my DMs who are not as successful as I am being like ‘how did you do this?’ inferring that I also didn’t deserve it because I didn’t come through the networks most people come through. I went to a state school. I didn’t major in journalism.”

Both Skolnik and Henderson have wondered what opportunities they had lost because they couldn’t afford to take unpaid internships and didn’t have access to alumni networks from elite schools. Small details like having to pay rent and keep the lights on prevented them from, say, moving to Manhattan for a semester to intern at a prestigious publication or cable news network or accept that $26,000 a year entry-level job at a magazine. This made them acutely aware that coming up through nontraditional pathways made them feel like they had to work harder to prove that they were just as good as their more privileged peers.

Retired nurse Betsy Kingery, 64, acknowledges that she was in a fortunate situation when she decided to pursue a career in nursing in her mid-thirties. Although her husband, a tax attorney, provided a comfortable living for Kingery and her four children, she realized that she couldn’t take her partner’s income for granted.

“I know this is going to sound strange,” Kingery said, when asked what prompted her to start a career later in life, “But two of my friends. [My one friend’s], husband literally dropped dead. And another, her husband left her for a younger woman, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I need a way to support myself.’”

Kingery already earned a degree in environmental science in the ‘70s, but soon realized that she’d need to earn another bachelor’s degree while raising her kids, whose ages ranged from grade school to high school. She finished her program at 38 and spent the next 21 years working as a nurse in maternal child health, psych wards, and in research at a facility specializing in outpatient neurology.

“Going back to school for me was actually difficult emotionally because I’m not a good student, I don’t like school. I couldn’t sit still,” Kingery said. “My kids were in school and that was really helpful because we would all study together. Interestingly, the entire grade point average of the household increased. It was good for them to see Mom study.”

Although Kingery was intimidated by going to class with “20-somethings,” she found that she held certain advantages over her younger classmates.

“When I started doing clinical work, I realized that I brought something to the table,” Kingery said, “ in terms of life experience. I had the ability to keep calm in emergencies.”

Carol Hartsell also found that her experience made her uniquely qualified for her job in comedy. Granted, that career didn’t begin in earnest until her 40th birthday when she quit her job writing about comedy for Huffington Post to actually produce original videos for a startup. From there, Hartsell,43, scored a job working as a digital producer for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert before landing her current job as Managing Digital Producer for Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.

“Being from Alabama and not coming from an artistic family, I didn’t know that TV and film was something you could pursue a job in,” Hartsell said. She eventually figured it out.

Before getting hired at the Huffington Post in her mid-30s, Hartsell was working as a graphic designer in the marketing departments of magazines while producing mostly free comedy shows in the basements of Lower East Side bars at night.

“I was such a fan of comedy,” Hartsell said. “but I didn’t want to be a bystander anymore. After getting laid off from a magazine after six years, the severance package gave me a bit of a cushion to figure out to think ‘how do I turn this comedy obsession into a career?’ The senior editor job at Huffington Post was my equivalent of sort of having a job in comedy, but I still felt like a bystander, however, it built to something even if it didn’t feel like a comedy job.”

Along the way to figuring out what that comedy career looked like, Hartsell received some discouraging advice.

“I have had multiple people tell me not to tell people how old I am, men and women. I had a dinner with a woman who was very high up at a network and I must have been 39 at the time,” Hartsell said. “I just casually threw out how old I was and she’s like ‘Don’t tell people that. Just say that you’re 29 and everyone will believe you.’ She was in her 40s and I was taken aback by it. It’s like, we’re supposed to be fighting this kind of thing.”

Hartsell has never felt the need to conceal her age out of fear of discrimination, and in doing so, inspired others in realizing that there’s more than one path to professional and artistic fulfillment. Along that path, people get stuck. They work jobs they don’t love and beat themselves up watching their friends post evidence of vacations, promotions, and other trophies of lives well lived on their Facebook pages. But those years spent designing marketing brochures when they’d rather be producing segments for late night shows aren’t wasted. Stagnation isn’t failure, but an exercise in developing the courage and character to act when opportunity presents itself.

In Hartsell’s case, her age and experience turned out to be an asset.

“When I was at HuffPost, I resigned myself to the notion that for the rest of my life, I was always going to be working for people who are younger than me,” Hartsell said. “But there is something great about working for women in your age range where they really care about hiring women, promoting women, and paying them what they’re worth. It’s useful to be my age and have the background I’ve had and the awareness of modern history that I’ve had.”

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