By Emilie Ok Adin

Being a profitable skilled and toddling author collectively in the identical physique is difficult. Having seen profession successes, I’m now studying to embrace—or not less than settle for—a string of rejections that fall like the primary rain drops on a cloudy day: not totally surprising, however disappointing all the identical.

I’m reliving my early days as an city planner: attending networking occasions the place I knew nobody, clutching my pocket book like a defend, attempting to decode the unstated guidelines of a career I desperately needed to affix. The previous studying curve has returned, solely this time I’m climbing it with middle-aged knees.

The final time I confronted comparable challenges, they formed a profession that carried me by greater than 20 years of public life. Years spent main metropolis departments, instructing graduate college students, and chairing nationwide and provincial committees culminated, not way back, in attending my first dinner as a newly inducted member of the School of Fellows for my nationwide skilled affiliation. I discovered myself sitting amongst long-serving stewards of my career—friends whose names I’d as soon as learn in media articles and on award packages.

This was the sensation of acceptance. Why might I not sit with it for some time?

Surrounded by tables of planners whose hair had turned white or fled altogether, I noticed a lot of my fellow Fellows are easing into retirement. And right here I’m, shyly turning the web page. Whereas my skilled life has been outlined by constructing cities, insurance policies, and establishments, I’m now attempting to construct one thing far much less predictable: a writing life.

Analysis says that folks below 50 are more likely to modify jobs—or complete careers—than folks over 50, whose probability of even contemplating a change is seemingly solely 12%. A 3rd of employees who say they received’t even think about altering their careers give the primary purpose as being “too previous.”

The numbers are medical, however beneath them lies a cultural script: after fifty, you’re purported to coast. Accumulate a pension, ease into predictability, follow what you recognize. Reinvention is marketed to the younger—hole years, internships, profession pivots—whereas a midlife profession change is solid as a disaster at finest, a folly at worst. And but, historical past is filled with late bloomers. Why ought to planners-turned-writers be any completely different?

Which brings me again to my very own unbelievable reinvention. What made me, two years shy of the 55+ “Seniors Days” reductions at my native pharmacy however twelve years away from claiming my Municipal Pension Plan, step out of the quick lane as an city planner and into the stumbling lifetime of writing for (little) pay?

Maybe it’s stubbornness. Maybe it’s curiosity. Maybe it’s the dream of being a capitalized-w-Author—it merely refuses to let me go.

Most probably, I simply can’t assist myself.

Every day, I attempt to quiet the world—its shifting gentle, its fixed calls for—and provides myself over to the work of writing. Not for reward or reward, however just because I need to. I put pen to paper as a result of the act of writing steadies me. After years of shaping communities, I need to form sentences. I’m studying to clamber up a brand new hill, and I’m loving my precarious ascent.

I don’t know the place this second climb will lead, however I do know that each metropolis, each life, is constructed draft by draft. I suppose I’m nonetheless planning—solely now, the uncooked materials is language as a substitute of land use.

If it is a midlife disaster, I’ll take it. I’ve constructed cities; now I’m attempting to construct tales. Each, it seems, demand creativeness, endurance, and religion in what doesn’t but exist.

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Emilie Ok Adin is a metropolis planner, author and speaker, and an adjunct professor on the College of British Columbia. She is a 2025 graduate of the College of King’s School MFA in Inventive Nonfiction program. Her writing seems in The Globe and Mail, McSweeney’s Web Tendency, The Tyee and elsewhere. Discover her at emiliekadin.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/emiliekadin/.

Tagged: profession change, new challenges, writing at fifty