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You’re Not Behind. You’re Becoming.
Starting my own business has left me in this perpetual thought-state: You should be further along by now.
Every technical problem I solve, I wonder why I can’t get it done faster. I built an ETL pipeline for a client that was supposed to take hours and instead it took days. Everywhere I turned, there was a new data nuance I had to address.
That thought, though—you should be further along—is really everywhere in my life: my work, health, writing, and parenting. It’s the annoying, inaccurate, persistent voice that’s always reminding me where I should be, what milestones I should have hit, and how much I should have accomplished.
The idea of “should” always comes back to comparison. Someone else’s path. Someone else’s timing. Someone else’s life.
When I was younger, I thought about it in terms of being a “late bloomer.” My friends hit growth spurts before I did. Their voices dropped sooner. They could grow some facial hair while I could barely manage peach fuzz. I got teased plenty for it. Back then, I thought I was behind. But then I outgrew most of them, and by the time high school choir rolled around, I was the second-lowest bass in the room. My body had caught up. It just took its time.
That pattern has repeated itself in other ways. At the piano bench, I was decent, but never as…
