303. Late Bloomers

At the age of 58, Mitch Jasper felt his life was over. He had lost his family, was forced out of his job, and suffered from major depression. Here’s what he wrote about it all.

I was mentally under attack about it being too late in the afternoon. I’d win one skirmish only to find myself in another battle ten minutes later. I needed to move beyond endless introspection. My fingers and a computer keyboard were my instruments of action. I typed “late bloomers” into a search engine, and the results made a stunning list: Ray Kroc, who started a worldwide network of McDonald restaurants when he was 52, with major health problems and a life of neither fame nor fortune up to that point; Colonel Sanders; Grandma Moses, who started painting when she was 78; Nelson Mandela, who came out of prison to be President of South Africa on his 89^thbirthday; Charles Perrault, who published Cinderella and Tom Thumb when he was 69; Francis Chichester, who sailed around the world solo in 1967, when he was 65; Peg Phillips, who started acting professionally in her late 60s after retiring from a career as an accountant. And many others.

From
TOO LATE IN THE AFTERNOON
One Man’s Triumph Over Depression
Available in paperback on Amazon and eBook on Kindle

About Patrick Day

In 2010, I escaped from four long years of deep, dark depression. This blog shares lessons I learned from those years as depicted in my autobiography - How I Escaped from Depression - as well as other insights about depression and anxiety that only come from someone who has gone through it. When you have a heart attack, you become an expert in heart attacks. When you have diabetes, you become an expert in that condition. As such, I am an expert in depression, with a four-year experiential degree and graduate studies in how to live a life going forward that keeps the ever-lurking Depression at a healthy distance.

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