Your friends’ timelines aren’t your deadlines. They’re just other people’s calendars.

Other people’s milestones arrive in your life as news, and news feels like a schedule. It is not one. What you are seeing is the visible result of conditions you have no access to, happening in an order that made sense for them, and it carries no information about when anything should happen for you.

When the comparison starts, get specific rather than general. Name the actual thing you want and when you would want it, for your own reasons, without reference to anyone. If you cannot answer that, the discomfort is probably not about being behind.