“Aren’t You A Bit Young To Be Writing About This Stuff!?”

In 2011 or 2012, I was asked if I would like to go to a talk at a university that was on food. I thought that this would be interesting, so I agreed to go along.
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If I remember rightly, there were a number of people there who spoke, and a number of them worked for big companies that supplied food. I think it only lasted a few hours, but I was pleased that I went along.

Time to Relax

Once it was over, everyone had the chance to have something to drink and there were also snacks available. And as my friend was a student there, he knew a number of the people there.

This was also a time when a few people asked what I did, and one person was a bit surprised by what they heard. I said that I write about psychology and I then went into a few of the areas that I covered.

Both Ways

After I had said this, they said something like “aren’t you a bit young to be writing about this stuff!?” They were not the only ones who were finding it hard to come to terms with what has just been said, as I felt the same way.

I was trying to understand why someone would say something like this. I didn’t believe that there was a certain age when someone would start writing about the kind of things that I was writing about.

The Main Thing

I think I said that it didn’t matter how old someone was - what matters is if they have been able to face what happened to them and to work through it. And that even if someone was a lot older than me, it doesn’t mean that they will have done this.

As far as I was concerned, my age was irrelevant, and I thought that my work spoke for itself. At the same time, I did understand that there probably weren’t a lot of people doing what I was doing.

One Interpretation

This person might have spent a lot of time around students, who were of a similar age, who were only studying psychology. Most of these people were probably only just beginning to understand this subject.

Yet, at this point I had been looking into this stuff for nearly 9 years, so it wasn’t as if I was in my first or second year, for instance. The experiences I had had throughout my life also had a big effect, and these experiences couldn’t be replaced by reading books.