Am I Late, or Am I Becoming?
There is a particular kind of anxiety that comes from watching other people move ahead.
You see someone receiving an opportunity. Someone announcing a new achievement. Someone building something impressive. And even though you are happy for them, a quiet question appears somewhere inside:
“Am I already behind?”
For a long time, I carried that question.
Not because I was doing nothing. Not because I had no dreams. But because I was comparing my timeline with people who seemed to have figured everything out earlier than I did.
Some people started building their careers, collecting experiences and exploring opportunities while I was still trying to answer a more basic question:
What do I actually want?
And perhaps that took time.
But maybe taking time to understand yourself is not the same as falling behind.
There is a difference between moving quickly and moving in the right direction.
When I look back now, I realise that many of the things I have achieved were things I once wished for. But they did not come easily. Almost every opportunity came after a period of uncertainty, hard work and proving myself.
I have learned that achievement is rarely a straight road.
Sometimes it begins with confusion.
Sometimes it begins with trying something and later realising, “This is not where I belong.”
And that realisation is not failure.
One thing I have learned about myself is that I cannot continue doing something simply because it looks impressive from the outside. I need to understand whether it aligns with who I am, what I value and what kind of person I want to become.
There have been moments when I started something with excitement, believing it was exactly what I wanted. But after experiencing it, I understood that it was not the right place for me. Walking away was not easy. Leaving something behind can feel like admitting defeat.
But sometimes knowing what is not meant for you is also a form of growth.
The difficult part about building a future is that progress is not always visible.
People see the congratulations.
They see the achievements.
They see the announcements.
They do not always see the uncertainty before them.
They do not see the applications that received no response. The opportunities that went to someone else. The emails beginning with:
“Thank you for your interest, but…”
Those words hurt.
Not because rejection is unexpected. Rejection is a normal part of trying.
Get Rafiah Binte Mizan’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
It hurts because every rejection carries a question:
“What did I do wrong?”
“Why was I not enough?”
“What did they have that I did not?”
For a moment, it becomes easy to forget everything you have already done.
A single rejection can become louder than dozens of achievements.
But after the disappointment settles, I try to remind myself:
One rejection cannot erase years of growth.
It cannot erase the projects I built.
It cannot erase the people I worked with.
It cannot erase the skills I developed, the challenges I overcame or the moments when I proved to myself that I was capable.
Maybe success is not about winning every opportunity.
Maybe success is about continuing to show up even when some opportunities do not choose you.
There is also something else I have learned: building a future should not mean losing yourself in the process.
Ambition is beautiful because it introduces us to versions of ourselves we never imagined. It pushes us to learn, create and grow. But ambition should not become a constant reminder that we are not enough yet.
There will always be someone ahead of us.
Someone younger.
Someone faster.
Someone who started earlier.
But their timeline was never supposed to be ours.
The goal was never to win a race everyone else was running.
The goal was to understand which race was actually mine.
Maybe I was not late.
Maybe I was learning.
Maybe I was building not only a career, but also an understanding of who I am and what I want to contribute.
And perhaps that is the most important part of the journey.
Not becoming someone who has achieved everything.
But becoming someone who still enjoys the person they are becoming.
