Being late can no longer be my identity

The Early Bird, The Late Girl, and Everything In Between.

I was not born late, technically. But I was overdue. My mom will tell you that herself, with a look on her face that says this explains everything about me. And honestly? She is not wrong.

For as long as I can remember, I have had a complicated relationship with time. Not in the way that I do not value it, but in the way that my body and my brain have historically disagreed about when things need to start. My body says five more minutes. My brain says we are already behind. And somewhere in that negotiation, time passes, and I am late again.

But before I was the grown woman setting three alarms and still somehow miscalculating, I was a little girl in Ecuador with a school uniform and a bus to catch, and mornings that, in hindsight, were some of the most beautiful and unremarkable moments of my entire life. I did not know that then, of course, you never do.

The Bus, The Bridge, and Ten Cents

After the hair was done and breakfast was eaten, the morning routine shifted into its next phase: getting to school. Every morning my mom and I would rush to catch the small bus that stopped right across the street from our house. The fare was ten cents, which back then was not nothing. My mom would go to the store with one dollar and come home with a quart of milk, a few eggs, some chicken for dinner, and a small bag of rice and oil. Ten cents was real money. But we paid it, and we rode that bus all the way downtown.

From the bus stop by the mall, we would jog to the pedestrian bridge and cross it to get to school. Every single morning. And every single morning, without fail, we arrived late.

The guard at the door knew my name. Not because I was a troublemaker, but because I was a regular. He would look at me, shake his head with a small smile, and say “You are late again, Joselyn” as he let us through the doors. He said it the way you say something you have accepted as a fact of life, like the weather or the tides. Joselyn is late. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. These things simply are.

The Morning Ritual That Waited Inside

Once inside, the day had its own ceremony before it could properly begin. We would line up with our classmates and sing the national anthem, then the school anthem. We did the morning prayer. We stood still through the daily announcements and moved our bodies during morning stretches. And only after all of that were we sent to our classrooms.

There was something about that ritual I did not appreciate until much later. The forced stillness of it. The collective pause before the day rushed in. Everyone standing in a row, voices rising together, the same words every morning. It was repetitive and mandatory and, as a child, mildly annoying. But it was also grounding in a way I did not have the vocabulary for at the time. It was, whether we knew it or not, a form of centering. A way of saying: before this day takes you, stop. Be here. Begin together.

I could use more of that now, honestly.

Oh How I Long For Those Times

In the Office, Andy said something about longing for the days that have passed. And while I am paraphrasing a little loosely here, I think he was onto something. There is a particular kind of ache that comes with looking back at a chapter of your life and realizing you were happy in it, genuinely and fully happy, and you did not know it because you were too busy living it to notice.

“I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” – Andy Bernard

Let’s not even get started on King Salomon, who had some very strong thoughts about life and wisdom. At the end of the day, between Solomon and Andy, I think between the two of them, the entire human experience of nostalgia is covered.

Those mornings in Ecuador were not glamorous. We were rushing, always. The bus was small, the bridge was a jog, the guard knew my name for all the wrong reasons. But there was a rhythm to it that I did not understand, nor know that I would miss. My mom’s hand in mine as we jogged across the bridge, the ten cents, the national anthem in a line with my classmates. The way the school day had a beginning, a real one, with ceremony and song and a prayer said out loud with everyone around you.

I did not know those were the good times. I thought the good times were coming. And maybe they were, and maybe they did. But those mornings were good too, in their own unremarkable, ordinary, irreplaceable way.

The Late Girl, Revisited

I have made a kind of peace with the girl who was always running late. She was not careless. She was a child (and an adult) who loved to sleep, who moved through the world at her own pace, who was overdue even before she arrived. She was me, and I understand her now. 

But I am also not entirely her anymore. Somewhere along the way, and I cannot tell you exactly when it happened, I started to feel the weight of other people’s time. The way showing up late to someone says, without meaning to, that your time matters more than theirs. I did not want to be someone who said that. So I made a quiet decision, not a dramatic one, not a resolution or a declaration, just a decision: I want to be someone who arrives early. Not because the late girl was wrong, but because the woman I am becoming is learning what it means to be respectful with the one resource nobody can get back.

I do not always get it right. Some mornings that old version of me shows up, hits snooze, miscalculates, and arrives just slightly breathless and five minutes behind. But she shows up knowing, now, that time is not just hers to spend.

That is growth, I think. Quiet, unglamorous, still-in-progress growth.

That’s it for now. Love you, bye.