Dealing With Timeline Anxiety
You may be wondering what timeline anxiety is. It’s a constant thought, whether it be in the back of your mind or your first thought when you wake up in the morning. You hear it in questions like “So what’s next for you?” or “You’re still doing that?” or “By this age I thought I’d…” It echoes in birthdays, job updates, major life events like marriage or even simple engagement photos - small reminders that time is moving, and you still haven’t caught up to… whatever it is you were suppose to become.
That’s timeline anxiety.
It’s the feeling of pressure to be somewhere else in life. To hit these specific marks by a certain age. To explain yourself. To prove your not lost. Even when you are. You start measuring yourself to everything you hear and see in your daily life. Where your coworkers, friends, family and people you follow on social media are at in life. What your younger self thought you would be. What people might think when they look at your life from the outside. You start wondering if your moving to slowly or too quickly, if you’ve missed the door that only opens once.
It gets exhausting, not just because you’re uncertain - but because you’re trying to act like you’re not. You start watching how you answer those questions I listed earlier. You answer them as vaguely as possible to avoid further conversation on the topic. You smile through it. You keep yourself busy to stay away from the silence. But deep down you know there is a game of tug-of-war going on between who you are and who you were suppose to be by now. And the worst part? No one really ever talks about it.
We always celebrate milestones but rarely sit with the people who haven’t reached them yet. We rush to reassure - “You’re fine!” “You’ve got time!” - but rarely do we pause long enough to ask: Where did this pressure even come from? Why do we believe there’s a clock on becoming ourselves? And the truth is, most timelines are made up. we inherit them. From culture. From family. From movies and graduation speeches. Somewhere along the way, we absorb this story that there’s a correct order to life, and that if we deviate from it, you’ve failed.
But that’s real life. Real life has its detours. It collapses and rebuilds. It asks to start over when you least expect it. People grow at different speeds and people arrive at different times. Some people peak early and others are late bloomers, but they’re still healing from the last storm. There is no single route. Just a million messy, beautiful, winding ones. So what do you do with timeline anxiety? You name it and you sit with it. You stop pretending you’re unaffected. You remind yourself that being uncertain isn’t the same as being too far behind. And you stop comparing your path to someone else’s highlight reel.
Some days, that might look like tuning out the noise. Logging off, saying no to questions that make you shrink. Finding people who don’t measure your worth by your progress or where you are in life. Learning to say, “I’m figuring it out,” without shame. There is strength in that. You are not behind. You’re just in a chapter that doesn’t look like anyone else’s. And that’s okay, even when it doesn’t feel like it.
