What Kylie Minogue Can Teach Us About Answering Our Calling After 50
I recently watched a documentary about Kylie Minogue. I'm not a fan of her music, not much of a pop music fan really, but like so many back in the eighties I was caught up in her cute days as Charlene in Neighbours, so I've always liked her. She comes across as a good person too, not someone you'd imagine setting out to hurt anyone.
The part of her story that touched me most was her battle with cancer at thirty-six. It reminded me of all the people I'd worked with over the years in the cancer world, and how utterly devastating that diagnosis is. I must have run over forty groups of people living with cancer — those facing it for the first time, and those with what is referred to as secondary cancer, where it returns. And this is what I learned after a while: you never really get over cancer, even if you are cured, as they say. The impact of it on your body and your psyche lasts forever. The slightest niggle in the body can bring a sharp reminder, even years later.
I was always struck by the courage of the people I worked with. The way they showed up every week, ready to work their way through what was probably the worst time of their lives, and often turning up to find someone in the group hadn't made it.
What Forty Rooms Taught Me About What a Calling Really Is
What I noticed in those rooms, after a while, was that the people who kept showing up — the ones who got out of bed on the worst mornings, who came to the group when their hair was gone and their energy was almost gone too — were not the people with the best prognosis or the most reason to be hopeful. They were the people who had something they had not yet finished. Children they wanted to see grow up. A reconciliation they were working toward. A garden. A piece of music. Something inside them that was still pulling at them, and that they were not yet willing to put down.
And that, more than anything I read or studied, taught me what a calling actually is.
And by a calling I don't mean a grand destiny — the one great purpose that some fortunate people are handed and the rest of us go without. I mean the thing that keeps pulling at you. The book you keep not writing. The move you keep talking yourself out of. The work you do in private and tell no one about. Most of us have one. We just don't always call it that.
Kylie Minogue and the Voice She Couldn't Ignore
Kylie's story is another version of the same thing. She had a dream to be a pop star. She was not the best singer in the world and she knew it. The press in those years called her the singing budgie, and worse. She has been open about the years of self-doubt that came with the criticism. And still, the voice inside her would not let her stop. If someone can keep going through that level of public criticism, and then through a life-threatening illness on top of it, then what we call human potential is bigger than most of us are willing to give ourselves credit for.
This is what I was writing about last week, in the piece on Carl Jung's unlived life — what we set aside in ourselves does not disappear; it waits. Kylie's life is one of the clearest examples I can think of, of a person who did not set hers aside.
Then came the cancer, at thirty-six, when there were years she might not have had. And still, after all of it, she came back to the stage. The voice inside her was stronger than the criticism, and stronger than the illness.
Why Your Calling Changes Shape Over Time
And here is something else Kylie's life shows. The calling does not always stay the same shape. She started as an actress, then she sang, then she became the kind of pop performer she is now. Same person, same pull, different forms it took at different times. The calling moved with her, and she moved with it.
The cancer changed her too. She has talked about that — that she could not go back to being the person she was before the diagnosis, even after recovery. The illness did not just take time away from her. It gave her something. A deeper sense of what mattered, perhaps, or what didn't. The performer who came back to the stage was not the same as the one who had been taken off it.
I saw versions of this in the cancer rooms too. Not everyone, and not always, but often enough. People who came through treatment with a clearer sense of what they were not going to spend their remaining time on. People who finally let themselves want what they wanted. People who said yes to things they had been deferring for thirty years, because the deferring had stopped making sense to them.
This matters because most of us, by the second half, have tried things. We went into a career and it was not quite the one. We took a path and the path closed. We did the thing we thought we were meant to do, and it turned out to be a version of the thing, not the whole of it. Or we are still doing it, but the meaning has gone out of it, and we are not sure what comes next. For some of us, the answer to that is to reinvent the next chapter altogether.
The temptation, when this happens, is to think the calling has been answered already, or that it has gone quiet, or that the version we tried means there is nothing more. None of those is necessarily true. The calling may simply have changed shape. And the work, then, is not only to answer the voice. It is to listen to what shape it is asking to take now.
Why I Keep Writing Anyway
And this is the thing I keep coming back to. It isn't always the ones with the best voice who become stars. It isn't the ones who are best at the job who get the promotion. It isn't the ones who feel most sure of themselves who write the book or start the business or change their life at sixty. It is the ones who don't give up, whatever story is going on inside.
The pull to write has been with me for most of my life. It was my outlet as a child — I'd write all my thoughts in a diary and then hide it away, feeling like I'd told someone, because nobody was going to listen in the real world.
I was not a natural writer. I am still not a natural writer. I started reading late. I was always in the bottom sets at school. I didn't learn prose. In fact, I wasn't even allowed to study English Literature. School didn't instil a sense of self-belief, and I left without any qualifications. But in spite of the many "you're not good enough"s, I went on to get my computer science degree in my late thirties — and to publish a book in my sixties, with one more in the making.
And still, I write. Not because I think I'm any good. Not because I don't know there are people who do this better. But because the voice inside me does not care about that, and never has. It just keeps telling me that someone, somewhere, might just need to hear what I am sharing. So I put it out there.
And here I am at sixty-four, still asking the question. Not whether I can write — I have answered that one. Whether I am willing to let myself become what I might still become. There is a voice in my head that has been getting louder lately, telling me it is too late. That whatever I might have been, the window has closed. I do not entirely believe it. But I do not entirely not believe it either. Some days the voice that keeps calling me forward is louder. Some days it isn't. And that is the work I am doing now.
How to Answer Your Calling Before It's Too Late
Maya Angelou said, "people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." What I take from that is that the calling was never about being good enough at the thing. It was about answering it — in whatever form it is asking to take now, however imperfect, and whoever else might do it better. Our life's purpose is not to get it right. It is to live the part of us that has not yet been lived.
What I've learned from the years of working with people facing the worst, and from the times when my own life wasn't easy, is that the ones who answer the voice that keeps calling them are not the ones who have it all placed at their feet, or who are most prepared. They are the ones who cannot ignore that calling.
Whatever the voice inside you is telling you — the book, the painting, the move, the conversation, the change — you already know what it is. The question is whether you are going to spend the time you have left answering it. I hope you do.
If you would like to take this further, my book How Did I Get Here? is a guide to letting go of your past and living in alignment with your true self. Which, when I get to the heart of it, is what answering the voice actually is.
