It is November. Somewhere at the back of your mind, a calculator has switched itself on.
Ten months gone. Two left. The plans you made in January are still sitting where you left them. And the arithmetic begins: how old you are, what you have, what you don't have, and who your age-mates have become while you were busy surviving.
"I should have been further by now."
"Everyone is moving except me."
"At this rate, I'll never catch up."
If that voice sounds familiar, you are not alone. Many people carry it quietly all year, and the end of the year turns the volume up.
But before you agree with that voice, ask it one question.
Behind what?
Behind Is a Measurement, Not a Fact
You cannot be behind on your own. "Behind" only makes sense when there is something to be behind: a schedule, a race, a person further down the road. It is not a description of where you are. It is a comparison between where you are and a plan.
So the real question is not whether you are behind. It is this: whose plan are you measuring yourself against? And did you ever agree to it?
Most of us never sat down and drew the timetable we now feel we are failing. We inherited it.
For many Nigerians, it goes something like this. Finish secondary school, get into university, graduate around twenty-two to thirty-five. Serve. Get a good job, preferably one your parents can mention at family meetings. Car before thirty. Married around the same time. Children soon after. A house of your own, ideally one in the city and one in your hometown. Then "settle down".
Nobody hands it to you as a document. It arrives in pieces: an aunt's question at a wedding, a comment when you travel home for Christmas, a prayer for "this year's testimony", a classmate's photo in front of a new car. By thirty, the programme is so familiar it feels like the truth.
It is not the truth. It is a schedule. And schedules can be wrong.
What Builders Know About Falling Behind
Every serious building project has a programme: a schedule that says when the foundations should be finished, when the walls should rise, when the roof should go on. And almost every project, at some point, falls behind it.
What happens next separates a good project manager from a panicked one.
The panicked one shouts at the workers. More hours, more pressure, cut corners, just get the floors up. The building rises quickly, and the problems hide in the walls until they are expensive to fix.
The good one stops and asks three questions.
- Was the programme realistic in the first place?
- Has the scope changed since it was drawn?
- What did the ground reveal when we started digging?
The third question matters most. You can plan a building perfectly on paper, then break ground and find water where you expected firm soil, or rock where you expected sand. Nobody failed. The site simply told the truth, and the plan has to listen.
Now ask those same questions of your life.
Was your programme realistic? Was "my own house by thirty-five" ever drawn for the economy you actually graduated into, or for the one your parents remember?
Has the scope changed? Perhaps you became responsible for a sibling's school fees. Perhaps you left a career because it was slowly emptying you. Perhaps you are building something larger than the original drawing ever allowed.
And what did the ground reveal? Loss. Illness in the family. A business that failed. A relationship that ended. A betrayal that took years to recover from. These are not proof that you were lazy. They are site conditions. Any honest schedule would have to be redrawn around them.
When the Ground Revealed the Truth
There came a point in my life when I had to admit something I had avoided for a long time: my life was not going well.
I had been measuring my speed against everyone else’s. I watched people on social media. I watched situations within my own family. And every comparison told me the same thing: you are behind. So I decided to catch up. I wanted to make money at all costs.
I tried many things I am not proud of, all because I was desperate to keep pace with a timeline that was never mine.
Then the consequences arrived. My decisions and choices brought me trouble, and I had to go into self-exile, to a place where I knew no one.
There, I started afresh. Life taught me lessons I never believed I could learn. And in that unfamiliar place, away from the noise, my problems finally stood in front of me and stared me in the face.
That was when I understood a painful truth: I had been the architect of my own problems all along. I had allowed myself to be carried away by trends, by inherited timelines and by the quiet pressure of society.
So I began to question things I had never questioned before.
The belief system I had inherited.
The fears I had carried for years.
The programming society had placed in me without my permission.
As a builder, I know that when a project goes wrong, you do not keep pouring concrete and hope for the best. You stop. You go back to the drawings. You ask hard questions. Three of them became my anchor:
1. Was the programme realistic in the first place?
Some of the plans I was chasing were never mine to begin with. They were borrowed from other people’s lives.
2. Has the scope changed since it was drawn?
Who I was, and what I truly wanted, had changed. My plan had not.
3. What did the ground reveal when we started digging?
Beneath the surface of my ambition were fears, inherited beliefs, and patterns I had never examined.
Honestly, that season was dark and uncertain. I will not pretend otherwise. But I can tell you this: it was worth it.
There will be a season when the ground of your own life reveals something you did not expect. When it comes, know that it is a season of loss and rebuilding. It will challenge your timeline. And if you let it, it will change it.
Sometimes the digging is not the destruction of your life. It is the beginning of a stronger foundation.
If this story speaks to where you are right now, I tell the fuller account in my book, No Enemy But Fear. I encourage you to read it on my website: reflectivemindsarena.com.ng/books/no-enemy-but-fear
You Are Comparing Your Foundations to Their Facades
Another reason the feeling is so loud. You can see everyone else's finished floors.
Social media is a street of facades: painted walls, good lighting, a new car parked in front. What you never see is the foundation: the loan behind the car, the family that helps behind the business, the years of quiet failure behind the "overnight" success, the cracks that have not yet shown.
Meanwhile, you see every inch of your own foundation. You know about every delay, every doubt, every naira you didn't have.
So you compare your trenches to their facades. Of course you lose.
Anyone who has watched a building go up will recognise this: the foundation stage often looks as if nothing is happening. For weeks, the site is mud, digging and steel below ground level. Passers-by assume the project has stalled. Then, once the foundation is right, the floors begin to rise, because at last they have something to stand on.
Some years of your life are foundation years. Nothing rises above ground. But something is being laid.
An Honest Distinction: Foundation or Abandoned Site?
It would be comforting to say that every slow season is secretly productive. It would also be another lie.
Drive through parts of Lagos, and you will see them: unfinished buildings with iron rods sticking out of the top floor, waiting years for a next level that never comes. Those are not foundations. They are abandoned sites.
So ask yourself honestly which one you are standing on.
A foundation season is quiet, but work is happening. You are learning, healing, saving, practising, or repairing something. You could name what is being laid, even if no one else can see it.
An abandoned site is quiet because everything has stopped. You are waiting for a better time, a better mood, a sign. Meanwhile, the rods are rusting.
If you are in a foundation season, the feeling of being behind is noise. You can thank it and keep working.
If you are on an abandoned site, the feeling is information. Not proof that you are a failure, but a signal that the work needs to restart, even if it is only one row of blocks.
Either way, panic is not the answer.
Why Panic Builds Badly
Fear can sound like wisdom. Urgency can sound like ambition.
When you believe you are behind, you start making decisions to catch up rather than to build well. You take the job because it looks good, not because it fits. You marry because the clock is loud, not because the person is right. You start the business because your mates have businesses. You pour the next floor before the last one has set.
Any builder knows what happens when floors are added faster than the structure was designed to carry. The building may stand for a while. But it now carries a weakness it never needed to have.
The feeling of being behind does not only make you sad. It makes you hurry. And hurry, in the wrong season, is how people end up living in buildings they never wanted.
December 31 Is Not Your Deadline
Notice how much of this pressure arrives in November.
The calendar year is a useful tool for accountants and planners. It is not a law of your life. Your growth does not know it is supposed to be finished by the thirty-first of December. Healing does not run on twelve-month cycles. Neither does mastery, nor faith, nor the slow work of becoming someone you respect.
The writer of Ecclesiastes put it simply: "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven" (Ecclesiastes 3:1, King James Version). Whatever your faith, there is wisdom in that line. A season is not a deadline. It is closer to weather, and good builders work with the weather, not against it.
So replace the questions that keep you awake.
Instead of "Why am I so behind?", ask: "Whose schedule am I measuring myself against, and do I still agree with it?"
Instead of "How do I save this year?", ask: "What is one thing I can lay down properly in the next sixty days?"
Redraw Your Programme
Tonight, take a sheet of paper and draw three columns.
- The Inherited Programme. Write down the milestones you were given, with the ages attached. Married by... House by... Next to each one, write who gave it to you: parents, church, school, friends, the internet. Be specific.
- The Site Conditions. Write down what actually happened: the losses, the responsibilities, the changes of direction, the economy, the discoveries about yourself. Write them as facts, not as failures.
- The Revised Programme. Go back to the first column and ask of each milestone: do I still want this, or did I only inherit it? Keep what is truly yours. Cross out what isn't. Then, for what remains, write one action you can take before the year ends. Not a resolution. One course of blocks.
Then answer these questions slowly, in writing:
- If no one were watching, what would I be building right now?
- Which milestone am I chasing mostly so that people will stop asking me about it?
- Am I in a foundation season or on an abandoned site? What is my evidence?
- What has my "delay" given me that the original schedule never could have?
You may find that much of the old timetable still makes sense to you. Keep it, gladly. You can respect where a plan came from and still decide whether it fits the ground you are actually building on.
Build at the Pace of Your Ground
The people around you are not ahead of you or behind you. They are on different sites, with different soil, building different things. Comparing your progress with theirs is like comparing a bungalow in Enugu with a tower on Victoria Island and asking which one is late.
Your life was never a race. It was always a construction. And a construction is not judged by how quickly it went up, but by whether it stands, and whether anyone can truly live in it.
So when that voice returns this November, and it will, answer it calmly.
Stop asking whether you are behind. Start asking whether you are building.
