They Didn't Ask Permission. You Don't Have To Either.

One of the toxic cultural lies we've all swallowed: there's a short window to build a life and establish an identity. And once it closes, that's it. All our other options evaporate.

It starts pretty early in our lives, too. Right around the time we go to college (if we go to college), the expectation is that we’re setting ourselves up for life. This degree is going to define the rest of our lives.

And that’s simply not true. Yet despite all the evidence to the contrary, we still feel boxed in by this lie. So here’s your permission slip to throw that belief in the trash. Not that you need permission!

Because these three women didn’t ask for it, and you don’t have to either.

The renowned celebrity wedding dress designer Vera Wang was a figure skater from the age of 8 until she was 19, when her skating career ended. What happened in 1968?

She failed to make the US Olympics Team:

Failure and devastation derailed her life path, so she went down a different one.

Let’s be clear that Vera Wang’s family was well-connected. She had a debutante presentation for crying out loud. Then after receiving an art history degree, she almost immediately became the youngest editor ever at Vogue.

The general population doesn’t get these advantages in life. But it doesn’t diminish the fact that she began a second career at 40.

Ah, the 40s! That magical decade where society discards and dismisses women as “old.” Funny how it coincides with right about when we start having fewer fucks to give, too.

That’s when Vera decided to leave her job at Ralph Lauren to create wedding dresses.

At 40. Not with a degree in fashion design, but art history, and a background in figure skating.

Now, in her late 70s, that’s all we know her for. But let’s not forget that isn’t what Vera had planned for her life.

Do you like folk art? Maybe you know about the folk artist Anna Mary Robertson Moses who lived to be 101.

Her popular name is Grandma Moses, because she didn’t become a recognized artist until she was legitimately a much older lady.

Anna didn’t have the luxury of going to college. She was a housekeeper while her husband worked as a farm hand. These were poor but hardworking people. She birthed 10 children, only 5 of whom survived infancy, which sounds like utter hell.

Through this, her creative outlet was embroidery.

Until arthritis took that away from her. She’d enjoyed drawing when she was younger, so her sister suggested that maybe painting would be easier.

Instead of baking the mailman a cake as a present, she decided to create a painting. So what started as a Christmas gift for the postman transformed into a nearly 3-decade long career as a folk artist.

Let’s get the timeline straight: the woman who would become Grandma Moses spent her whole life cleaning other people’s homes and raising children. Then in her late 70s, she took up painting scenes of her rural life.

In the beginning they were described as “primitive” since she had no real training. She remained undeterred. Eventually Anna’s work improved and one day an art collector saw her paintings in the window of a drug store. Just casually walking down the street, as one was wont to do in 1938.

And that was that! By the following year Grandma Moses had paintings hanging in the New York Museum of Modern Art and solo exhibitions from New York to DC.

The woman who was born in poverty spent the last 20+ years of her life enjoying the accolades of an accomplished artist all because she developed arthritis and had to give up her embroidery.

Before she was a best selling cookbook author and Food Network chef, Kardea Brown was a social worker. She has a degree in psychology from Oglethorpe University, along with a graduate degree from St. Peters University.

She doubled down on that education! She walked straight down that life path. Until something made her change her mind.

Kardea “never viewed her home cooking as nothing more than a hobby,” according to this L.A. Watts Times article.

It was just a hobby. Until it became a career pivot.

In 2015, Kardea started the New Gullah Supper Club in South Carolina. Traveling state to state, they featured traditional Gullah dishes that paid tribute to her mother and grandmother.

That same year, Kardea was a contestant on her first Food Network show. Fast forward to the present, she now has 2 cookbooks, a frozen food line at Walmart, and a restaurant inside the Charleston Airport, on top of her Daytime Emmy-winning show Delicious Miss Brown.

“Just a hobby” transformed a social worker committed to one life path into one of THE faces of Gullah/Geechee cuisine.

But it gets even better! In another example of tearing up the life script and moving at her own pace, Kardea didn’t get married until she was 38!

We LOVE a woman who doesn’t conform to the idea that marriage has to come before turning 30.

These are all real women who created lives and careers no one expected of them. Their lives weren’t perfect, they weren’t without sacrifices and roadblocks.

Kardea Brown wasn’t a debutante and Grandma Moses didn’t have Vera Wang’s connections, but even Vera knows what disappointment and the death of a life’s dream feels like.

And these are just examples of women doing a thing. They’re not templates, they’re not directives. You don’t have to use their blueprints to design your vida más chévere.

They’re just proof a pivot is possible.

Want more? Listen to the latest episode of La Vida Más Chévere, Decisions are NOT Life Sentences, on your favorite podcasting app.

Get the full show notes at PauletteErato.com. This is episode 97.