Your story isn’t late. It’s just not on their calendar.

Lateness requires a schedule, and the one you are measuring yourself against mostly belongs to other people: a cousin who graduated sooner, someone from your year with a job already, a number you decided at thirteen was the deadline for being good at something. None of those is your timetable. They are other people’s dates, borrowed and then used as evidence against you.

Write down whose clock you have been checking. Then decide what you want to be true a year from now and work back to this week using your own dates.