You're Not at the End. You're Between Chapters.

 

When you were small, some adult almost certainly crouched down and asked what you wanted to be when you grew up. You said astronaut, or veterinarian, or whatever your big sister said. Nobody warned you the question would come back around.

Kim E. Dooley got asked it again, in a manner of speaking, at sixty-five. She had spent decades as a professor, traveled to fifty countries, and built a career most people would call complete. Then she found herself standing at the far edge of all of it, wondering what came next. In her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience, she gives that feeling a name that is equal parts joke and truth. What do you call a sixty-five-year-old who is just figuring out what they want to be? A late boomer.

It is funnier than it sounds, and also more serious. Kim points out that her whole generation is quietly tangled up in this. Ask a recent retiree who they are, and they will almost always reach for the old title. "Hi, I'm Kim Dooley, Regents Professor Emerita." The credential does the introducing, because without it the answer feels alarmingly blank. As she puts it, with her usual bluntness, her generation is having an identity crisis.

What she refuses to do is treat that as a sad ending. People are living longer and healthier lives than ever, she writes, which means the years after a career are not a waiting room. They are real time, often decades of it, and they belong to you. The trouble is that nobody hands you a new self when the old one expires. You have to go looking for it.

So she went looking. She started imagining things she had never made room for. She built what she happily calls an encore career, adding life coach, speaker, and author to a résumé she had assumed was finished. She did not become a younger version of herself. She became a newer one.

That is the quiet gift of the phrase. A late boomer is not someone who missed the boat. It is someone still curious enough, at an age our culture tends to write off, to ask the kid's question one more time and actually mean it. What do I want to be now? Not for the paycheck, not for the title, but for the joy of it.

If you have hit a milestone birthday and felt that strange mix of pride and panic, the sense that the story might be over, Kim has news for you. It is not. You are simply between chapters, and the next one is yours to write.

When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience by Kim E. Dooley is available now on Amazon, for anyone ready to ask, at any age, what they want to be when they grow up.




Name: Kim Dooley

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