Adulthood has a way of making you feel behind without ever telling you what you were supposed to be on time for.

It’s not panic. And it’s not failure. It’s just that quiet sense that you’re slightly off-pace. Like everyone else, started earlier, moved faster, or understood something you missed.

You notice it in small ways. In conversations where people talk confidently about plans you’re still thinking through. In milestones that seem to arrive for others with less hesitation. In the comparisons you make before you remind yourself not to compare.

From the outside, people look settled. Decisive. Like they’re moving forward with a kind of confidence you don’t always recognise in yourself.

What’s easy to miss is how much of that confidence comes from familiarity, not clarity.

Most of what we call being “ahead” is simply repetition.

People look certain not because they know exactly what they’re doing, but because they’ve done the same things enough times to stop hesitating. They’ve learned which questions matter and which ones don’t need answers anymore.

That familiarity reads as progress from the outside.

But familiarity isn’t speed. It’s exposure.

It’s like sitting in a meeting you’ve already attended before. You know which parts matter. You know which ones don’t. You stop taking notes on everything. You stop bracing for every slide.

Someone in that same meeting, for the first time, looks slower. More tentative. They’re listening harder. Writing more. Pausing before they speak.

You’re usually comparing your first encounter with someone else’s fifth repetition. Your questions against their shortcuts. Your learning curve against their muscle memory.

No one looks unsure when they’re already familiar with the agenda.

So it’s easy to believe you’re behind, when what you really are is new to this part of the path.

And new always feels slower from the inside.

What makes this feeling linger is that adulthood never gives you a shared clock.

There’s no clear starting point. No universal signal that says, by now, you should be here. Life just keeps moving, and people step into different parts of it at different times, carrying different things.

So timing becomes personal, but comparison stays public.

You see outcomes without seeing how long it took someone to get comfortable with the questions you’re still asking. You see ease without seeing how often it was practised.

Adulthood rewards familiarity quietly. Not foresight. Not certainty.

The more often you face the same kinds of decisions, the less they announce themselves as decisions at all. They become background. Automatic. From the outside, that can look like being “sorted”. From the inside, it just feels like not stopping anymore.

Which is why it’s so easy to misread your own pace.

If you’re still asking questions, it doesn’t mean you’re late. It usually means this part of the path is still new enough to register.

Most people aren’t ahead.

They’re just familiar.

And most people who look settled didn’t arrive there by knowing more. They arrived there by staying long enough for uncertainty to stop feeling like a problem.

So if it feels like you’re moving slower than everyone else, it might not be slowness at all. It might just be first exposure. The early repetitions. The part where things still require thought.

That phase doesn’t come with applause. Or proof. Or a neat sense of arrival.

It just feels like this.

And maybe recognising that is enough to loosen comparison’s grip a little. Not because everything suddenly makes sense, but because you realise there was never a universal pace you were failing to keep.

There was only your timing.

Your repetitions.

And the quiet work of becoming familiar.

And maybe that’s the Luxury Silk.

Ada Obiajunwa
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Ada Obiajunwa writes from Lagos about the big truths tucked inside ordinary moments — friendship, self-discovery, and the quiet revolutions of everyday life. She believes in the power of presence, good banter, and decoding the unsaid. Through her fragrance studio, WhiffWonders, she also crafts scents that weave memory and emotion into experiences that feel like home.