My new book began with my writing about how within a single year, my mother died, I got fired from my sitcom writing job, my boyfriend broke up with me, and soon after, I got a rash on my face (for eight months) that made me look as if I'd fallen asleep on a George Foreman grill, leading many well intentioned people to ask, "Um, do you ever compare yourself to Job?" I had no mother, no boyfriend, no face, no job, and no idea of who I was. I began writing about how my life hadn't turned out the way I hoped. I always imagined I'd be the powerhouse who juggled a thriving TV writing career, an English sculptor husband, and two adorable children with a room in our loft where they could play the drums. But at 35, I was unemployed, single, and as far from any kind of success - both personal and professional - as I could imagine. I began to think that when people referred to the "great depression of the thirties," they were talking about my thirties. I had visions of myself living in a single room occupancy hotel, obese from a steady diet of government cheese, wearing a muu-muu stained with cheap wine and tears, while banging on my wheelchair with a spatula. I would joke about this to friends, pretending that I was kidding - a muu-muu, ha! - but the truth was, ending up alone was as scary as anything I could imagine. The only thing that kept me going was telling myself I was a Late Bloomer - I would triumph, just not in the time I expected. I told myself this to calm myself down - I was terrified - but in fact, there was little evidence that anything in my life would change. And then, one day I decided to buy a bicycle. If I'd known that teaching myself to ride a bicycle would forever change me, I would have been too afraid to try. Growing up, I'd never learned how. My mother battled cancer several times and amidst all the busy-ness of illness, I was afraid to ask anyone to teach me. At 35, I bought a bike with a seat so big it was practically a Barcalounger and so low it was essentially a sled. I wore so much padding that I looked like a bulkier Michelin Man, which helped as I constantly crashed into things -  trees, the side of a chowder shack, a shiny new Porsche. But even covered with bruises, even knowing that I looked like a complete idiot, every weekend I would get back on my bike. I went from being able to ride five unwieldy revolutions to ten (this took over a month). But more than that, the voice in my head, the one that had chanted, "your life's going nowhere," was now telling me, as I so often told myself on my bicycle, "forward, just go forward." I would invoke this new mantra often in the following years, including when I handed in the original draft of my book-about my mother’s slow death from a brain tumor, which was so bleak it could only be read with your head in the oven. And my publisher agreed. I had gotten a book contract based on a light, energetic dating column I had written chronicling things like: People who break up with you when you didn't know you were actually dating. My publishers wanted Sex and the City, not a more somber version of Death Be Not Proud. They wanted chic restaurants and saucy dalliances with men named Gustavo; I gave them hospice. And so, after almost two years of writing, I started again from scratch. Just go forward, I reminded myself in the worst of times. I like mentioning this failed draft because I’d always thought that all writers knew exactly the book they would write, but that wasn’t the case for me. Apparently, even my book was a Late Bloomer. I found myself asking how much can you change about yourself after a certain age? I mean, really change. Can you go from being scared to scrappy? From the emotional equivalent of a cheap pi'ata to a person who now understood that, however difficult, she could handle anything? I came to understand, to believe, that the answer was yes. And that I'd never be the same. Learning to ride a bicycle at 35 convinced me I could do anything, at any age. That was something I'd never felt before. Now I believe, as George Eliot said, "It's never too late to be what you might have been." You can change anything about yourself at any time. I know that now. It's as simple as learning to ride a bicycle. Amy Cohen was a writer/producer on the television sitcoms Caroline in the City and Spin City, a dating columnist for the New York Observer, and the dating correspondent for cable TV's New York Central. She lives in New York City.