There is a drawer in many homes — perhaps you have one — that holds the remnants of a former creative life. A set of watercolour paints, dried to cracked continents in their pans. A half-finished sketchbook whose blank pages have yellowed at the edges. A piece of embroidery, needle still threaded, as if its owner stepped away for a moment forty years ago and simply never returned. These objects do not gather dust by accident. They gather it because somewhere along the way, a woman decided — or was quietly persuaded — that making things was a luxury she had outgrown, a pastime suited to the young or the leisured or the genuinely talented, and that she was, regrettably, none of those things anymore.

What an extraordinary lie that is. And how thoroughly most of us have believed it.

There is a particular cultural story we inherit about creativity and age, and it runs in entirely the wrong direction. We are taught, implicitly and repeatedly, that creative impulse belongs to youth — that it peaks somewhere in our twenties, burns brightest in people who are prodigies or visionaries, and that the rest of us are merely spectators to their brilliance. By the time grey threads appear in our hair and our bodies begin their slow negotiation with gravity, we are supposed to have settled into a more sensible relationship with time: tending, managing, preserving. Not making. Not imagining. Not beginning.

But the body remembers what the mind has been trained to dismiss. The hands know the particular satisfaction of shaping clay or pulling a brush across paper in a way that cannot be fully explained or intellectualised. Something in us, older and quieter than our anxieties about competence, still reaches towards the act of making with a hunger that does not diminish simply because we have grown older. It only grows more insistent when we refuse to answer it.

And yet the refusal is understandable. Returning to a creative practice after years away — or beginning one for the very first time in your fifties or sixties — requires something most of us were never taught to cultivate: the willingness to be genuinely, uncomplicatedly bad at something. Children make terrible drawings with absolute joy. They write stories full of logical impossibilities and grammatical chaos and they read them aloud with tremendous pride. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we lose that magnificent indifference to quality, replacing it with a crippling concern for whether the thing we have made is good enough. Good enough for whom, we never quite specify.

What would it mean to make something with no audience in mind at all? Not for display, not for validation, not even for the polite appreciation of the people who love you — but simply because the making itself is the point, entire and sufficient?

This is where ageing, despite everything we are told about it, can become an unexpected ally. There is a particular freedom that arrives, often quietly and without ceremony, somewhere in the second half of life. The desperate need to be impressive — to perform capability, to project an image of someone still becoming — begins to loosen its grip. Not all at once, and not without resistance, but it loosens. And in that loosening, there is space for something more honest. More playful. More willing to sit with a page or a canvas or a piece of music and simply see what emerges, without the internal committee convening to judge the result before the ink is even dry.

There is also something worth naming about the way creative practice changes its texture as we age. The paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe in her eighties are not lesser than those of her forties; they are different in a way that reflects everything she had gathered and discarded and learnt to see. The late novels of Penelope Fitzgerald, who did not publish her first book until she was sixty, carry a compression and a wisdom that simply could not have existed earlier. Age does not diminish what we make — it concentrates it, filters it through decades of experience that a younger hand cannot yet have. The question worth sitting with is not whether you are too late, but what it is that only you, at exactly this point in your life, are capable of making.

There will be obstacles, of course. The practical ones — time, energy, the physical adjustments that ageing bodies sometimes require — are real and should not be minimised. But the deeper obstacles tend to be the stories we carry about what we deserve. Permission, again, rears its familiar head. Many women in particular have spent decades directing their creative energy entirely outward: into raising children, sustaining relationships, building careers, holding households together. The idea of redirecting even a fraction of that energy inward, towards something as seemingly self-indulgent as creative expression, can feel almost transgressive. As though making something for the sheer love of it is a pleasure that must be earned, or that requires justification to some invisible authority.

It does not. You do not need to justify the impulse to make things any more than you need to justify the impulse to breathe.

What creative life has been folded up and stored in you, patient and uncomplaining, waiting for the day you decide it is finally allowed out? Perhaps you cannot answer that immediately. Perhaps the honest response is that you have forgotten what making anything ever felt like, that the drawer has been closed for so long you have half-convinced yourself nothing is inside it.

But the needle is still threaded. The paint, even dried, remembers colour. And you, at precisely this age, with exactly this life behind you, are not too late for a single thing.