Life Doesn't Come With an Instruction Manual
Nobody hands you a manual when you're born, though you'd probably deserve one. So you end up writing the thing yourself, page by page, as you go.
That nagging voice telling you to slow down, play it safe, not embarrass yourself? That's criticism talking. People will insist they're only saying it for your benefit. Occasionally they mean it. Plenty of times they don't, and the voice ends up being the only thing standing between you and whatever you were about to try.
What's real isn't always what you assume it is, and it certainly isn't always what you were handed as fact. You can walk right past something you saw clearly, heard clearly, felt in your gut, because at some point somebody waved it off and said you were imagining the whole thing.
Age doesn't automatically deliver wisdom. For some people it just hardens the grooves they already stand in. A theory someone has carried around for decades can turn into a life jacket, the thing they cling to when a flood of new information threatens to pull them under.
Think about how genuinely difficult it is to get a person to change their mind. There's a reason religion and politics are banned from so many dinner tables. And maybe that difficulty is itself an argument for stepping outside the usual lines of thought. A lot of inventions started exactly there, with someone refusing to accept the arrangement they'd been given.
People arrive as originals. You can't press them into a shape that isn't theirs, not for long anyway. A gemstone gets cut along the lines its own structure allows; fight the structure and you ruin the stone. Worth asking, then, what happens to a person who's being carved into somebody's idea of a proper, contributing citizen.