What Being Told You Are “Before Your Time” Really Means

How to graduate from the pain of rejection & find the power of being yourself in a world of performances.

Suzy Theme

For years, I believed that being told I was “before my time” was a polite way of saying I did not belong. I took it as a label of rejection, a sign that I was somehow misaligned with the world around me. I saw myself as an ordinary person. I wore jeans, slacks & corduroy pants meant for movement in the now. It is important to understand that the design of the clothing was never the issue. The real problem was the arrogance of others who were trying to be cruel. They used their own style & performance to hide from the presence of someone who was simply being themselves.

I grew up in a family of ten children. I had five sisters & four brothers. I was the fifth child, what my sisters jokingly called the “bottom of the top half.” While I lived in the present, three of my five sisters would gather together & live as though they belonged in the eighteen hundreds. They sewed & purchased dresses for another century. I was grounded in the “now,” while they were comfortable in a performance.

The Town of Scales & the Rotating Trains

Our birthplace was a town of “scales,” a place that seemed to require exactly as many churches as it did bars, always weighing something unseen in the balance. My father worked at the old railroad station, & as a child, I saw things that stayed with me. I remember the train repair shop where the massive train cars were actually rotated inside a building while being worked on. It was a place of “shoulder-to-shoulder” life & industry.

Eventually, the town went quiet. People began driving forty-five minutes or more just to find work. I moved away, married & returned to build a life. My husband & I bought our first house; we renovated it into a duplex where we began to raise our three children. While he designed it, we physically built a new home together with our own hands. I was in my element. I was rooted.

Then the scales tipped. He accepted a job out of town. The marriage never legally dissolved, but we grew further & further apart as he lived in his own world. The bank auctioned our properties. I became a single parent & was forced to leave the home I had built with love.

Graduating into Emotional Transparency

Before I left that town for the last time, I experienced a spiritual awakening. I was called & anointed. If you do not understand the call, you can take it up with the Caller. That awakening tuned me into a deeper empath & writer. I began the grueling work of emotional transparency. I learned to recognize when old survival strategies were trying to “possess” me.

I eventually “graduated” from being a victim of my feelings. I learned to relate to my emotions rather than react from them. I learned that

“Vulnerability is courage.” “Strength is not avoidance; it is honesty.” “Emotions are not excuses for behavior.”

The Arrogance at the Station

Then came the ride. I went because my mother asked. I did not want her to feel ignored, even if it meant ignoring my own intuition. When we arrived at the renovated train station, the trap was set. Those three sisters were there, draped in their eighteenth-century finery. My mother had dressed for the occasion too. I stood there in my everyday clothes, the only one who had not been told the “Theme” of the day.

It was a calculated humiliation. It was not about the style of their dresses. It was about the arrogance they used to make me feel like I “did not get it.” They laughed while I cried quietly on the inside. I drove my mother home afterward, only to hear the familiar question: “Why could you not be more like your sister?”

The Revelation of Authenticity

That chapter has long since ended, but the lesson remains. I finally understand what “before your time” actually means. Sometimes, it is not that you are misplaced. It is that others are uncomfortable in the presence of someone who is simply being themselves.

Authenticity is a threat to those who are still hiding. When you refuse to wear the “costume” of the family dynamic, you expose the roles everyone else is still playing. What I once felt as rejection was actually resistance to the light I was carrying.

Today, my foundation is rooted in Jesus. Identity is not granted by family approval. There is power in His name, & there is a fierce, quiet freedom in finally becoming exactly who you were created to be.

No costume required. Spirituality & the tangible.

Written by Suzy Theme