Your friend’s timeline isn’t a deadline for you. Everyone runs on a different clock.

Watching other people arrive at things creates a schedule you never agreed to and cannot see clearly. What you observe is the announcement, not the years of circumstance, luck and help behind it, and comparing your inside to that outside will always produce the same wrong answer. The pace you are on is made of your own conditions.

When the feeling of being behind arrives, name the specific thing you think you are late for and ask who set the date. Usually nobody did. Then decide what a reasonable next step looks like from where you actually stand.