Catch up to what?
Over the Summer, I sat down with a financial planner and an advisor to talk about retirement.
I went into that conversation carrying a story I had been telling myself for years.
I'm behind.
I haven't saved enough. I didn't start soon enough. I should be further along by now. Retirement was something other people got to do. I had more or less assumed I'd be working until I died.
Apparently, I was wrong.
After looking at my finances, they both told me I had done a good job. I was in a decent position. Barring some major change in circumstances, retirement was not only possible, it might be possible several years before death.
I was shocked.
They could see it on my face.
And then they told me something I haven't stopped thinking about since.
Everyone thinks they're behind.
They told me they sit across from people who have more than a million dollars saved for retirement who are still convinced they haven't done enough.
For the record, I do not have a million dollars.
Not even close.
But it looks like I may also not need to spend the rest of my life panicking about it.
Which got me thinking about how much time I have spent worrying that I'm behind in other areas of my life too.
Behind financially.
Behind in my career.
Behind because I rent instead of own a home.
Behind in relationships because I'm divorced and single.
Behind in parenting whenever I look around and decide someone else seems to be doing it better.
Behind in life.
It's a surprisingly exhausting race considering no one ever actually told me where the finish line was.
And underneath all of that "behindness" was something I hadn't really named before.
If I'm behind, someone else must be ahead.
And if we're keeping score, eventually somebody has to win.
Which means somebody has to lose.
And somewhere along the way, I had absorbed the idea that if I fell too far behind, maybe that meant something about me.
Maybe I wasn't just losing.
Maybe I was a loser.
Oof.
That's a hell of a lot of meaning to attach to a retirement account.
But I don't think I'm alone in this.
We have created timelines for nearly every part of being human.
When we should establish a career. When we should buy a house. When we should find a partner. When we should have children. How much money we should have saved by 40 or 50 or 60. What our relationships should look like. How successful we should be. How much we should have figured out by now.
There is always another invisible marker telling us whether we're ahead or behind.
Except the longer I live, the less convinced I am that there is a track at all.
By midlife, people's lives have gone in a thousand different directions.
Some people are celebrating twentieth wedding anniversaries while others are getting divorced.
Some are sending kids to college while others are packing lunches for elementary school.
Some are retiring. Some are starting businesses. Some are changing careers. Some are buying houses. Some are selling everything they own because the life they worked so hard to build doesn't fit anymore.
So what exactly are we measuring ourselves against?
Maybe that's the question I've been sitting with since that meeting.
Not:
How do I catch up?
But:
Catch up to what?
Because "behind" only makes sense if there is somewhere I was supposed to be by now.
Who decided that?
Some of it comes from very real cultural expectations. Some comes from our families. Some from capitalism. Some from social media. Some from watching the people around us and using their lives as reference points for our own.
And some of it is so deeply embedded that I couldn't even tell you where I learned it.
I just know that somewhere along the way, I developed a picture of what a successful adult life was supposed to look like.
There would be a career trajectory.
A house.
A marriage.
Financial security.
Good parenting.
Retirement savings.
And presumably some point where I would look around and think, Excellent. I have successfully completed adulthood.
Still waiting on that one.
Instead, my actual life has been considerably messier.
I've changed careers. I've built businesses. I've closed businesses. I've been married. I've gotten divorced. I'm raising a child. I rent my home. I've had periods when money felt secure and periods when it absolutely did not. I've made good financial decisions and decisions I would make differently now.
In other words, I've had a life.
And yet I've spent a remarkable amount of that life holding it next to an imaginary one and grading myself accordingly.
And I'm starting to wonder what all that grading has actually done for me.
Has believing I'm behind made me more responsible? More motivated? More successful?
Or has it mostly made it really hard to recognize what I've already done?
I walked into that financial meeting believing I had failed at something.
The numbers hadn't changed when I walked out.
My history hadn't changed.
The amount of money I had saved hadn't magically increased while we were sitting there.
The only thing that changed was the story I was telling about it.
Before the meeting, the numbers meant: You fucked this up.
After the meeting, the same numbers meant: You're actually doing okay.
Well, shit.
How many other parts of my life have I been looking at through a story of being behind?
And what has that story prevented me from seeing?
Maybe the career that took longer to figure out wasn't late.
Maybe divorce isn't evidence that I failed at relationships.
Maybe renting a home doesn't mean I missed some important milestone of adulthood.
Maybe parenting isn't something I can be ahead or behind in at all.
Maybe some of the things I've been using as evidence that I'm losing are simply evidence that my life doesn't look like the template I absorbed.
There are practical realities, of course.
Money matters.
Planning for retirement matters.
Housing matters.
Careers matter.
Relationships matter.
This isn't an argument for throwing away the retirement calculator, quitting your job, and declaring that timelines are a social construct.
My financial planner would probably prefer I not take that lesson from our meeting.
It's about noticing the difference between having goals for our lives and using those goals to determine our worth.
I can want to save more money without making my current bank balance a referendum on whether I've been a successful human.
I can want my business to grow without treating every slower-than-expected month as evidence that I'm failing.
I can want things for my future without turning my present into the waiting room.
Because I think that's one of the biggest costs of believing we're behind.
We keep postponing the moment when we're finally allowed to feel okay about where we are.
I'll relax when I have enough saved.
I'll feel successful when my business reaches this number.
I'll feel secure when I own the house.
I'll feel lovable when I have the relationship.
I'll feel like a good parent when I finally figure out what the hell I'm doing.
I'll feel like I've made it when...
And the finish line moves.
Of course it does.
If people with more than a million dollars saved are sitting in financial planners' offices worrying that they're behind, apparently the million dollars doesn't cure it.
Because maybe this was never entirely a math problem.
Maybe it's a relationship-with-ourselves problem.
What happens if the measuring stick is always somewhere outside of us?
What happens when we spend our lives checking where everyone else is before deciding how we feel about where we are?
What happens when "more" keeps disguising itself as "enough"?
I'm not interested in pretending I've suddenly transcended comparison.
I haven't.
I will probably continue to have moments when I look sideways at somebody else's career, finances, relationship, home, parenting, or life and wonder if I'm doing mine wrong.
But now I have another question available to me.
Behind according to whom?
And maybe even more importantly:
What am I missing about my actual life while I'm busy measuring it against the one I thought I was supposed to have?
Because this is my life.
Not the preliminary version.
Not the version before I finally catch up.
Not the consolation prize because I didn't hit the milestones in the right order.
This one.
Right now.
And I don't want to spend the rest of it running a race I never consciously agreed to enter.
Especially when there was never a finish line in the first place.
❤ Leah
