I’m listening to “How to Change Your Mind,” by Michael Pollan. It’s a book about psychedelics and new science, and how people are using these substances to address depression, PTSD, and other mind and emotion issues.

It’s fascinating.

And in the book, the author interviews many people who have taken trips (in scientific settings and not). One of the people who had been a part of a study on Psychedelics (I don’t remember if his case was LSD or psilocybin) and felt like he gained a lot of positives from the experience mentioned that he was glad he was older when he had that experience, because it would not have had the same effect when he was younger.

Last week or the week before, I was reading a story about William Shatner turning 90 (!!), and he was asked what he wishes he had known at 20 that he knows at 90.

His reply:

“I’m glad I didn’t know because what you know at 90 is: take it easy, nothing matters in the end, what goes up must come down. If I’d known that at 20, I wouldn’t have done anything!”

(Source: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/may/20/william-shatner-interview-love-loss-and-leonard-nimoy )

First, I’d just like to say that for 90, he is looking quite well and fit.

Next, I totally get what he’s saying.

We experience things differently at different ages, and there are seasons to our lives.

For example, when I read “Atlas Shrugged” at 14 (and my father laughed and told me he’d talk with me about it when I had read it again in my 20s) and then when I read it again a mere four years later and again as a woman in my mid-30s.

I had different take-aways each time.

And as I got older, not all were as overwhelmingly positive as my first read-through.

After all, I had more life experience and I knew more about Ayn Rand.

However, I did take away some amazing things from each read, and made them a part of myself.

And the same has held true for experiences I’ve had in kink.

The same experience with different people, or at different times in my life, with different moods—I changes and fluctuates, and brings me more nuance each time.

And I could not have experienced it the way I do now at 47 when I was 20.

It was not possible for me, then.

Heck, some things that I’ve experienced this year I could not have imagined in 2019.

And it is not yet possible for me to experience these things like I will in another 20-30 years.

I’m Ok with that.

Because to me, my journey in kink is just that—a journey. It’s not about the final destination. It’s about what I experience along the way.

What about you?

What have you experienced in recent times that you would have experienced very differently, misunderstood, or even experienced to your detriment in your past?