Same, You're doing fine. We all do different sections of the game at different rates. My latest play through is a (Nightmare) Rift Mage. She is Level 22 and I still have yet to complete the other half of the hissing wastes, half the exalted plains, begin the western approach and the forbidden oasis.
The only advice I can give to you is this. Turn on the top two trials and the last one. Even Ground, Walk softly and Grizzly end. The first keeps all enemies at least at your level, the second, makes them a little tougher. On nightmare, when they have guard they can be a bit of a pain.. The third, just makes bears a bit more dangerous.
If you are worried about your level Even ground will ensure all enemies are at your level or higher so you will continue to get experience from every enemy you defeat. Though, you need trespasser installed.
Another thing I can recommend, but is platform dependent is this, If you play on PC and you have not done so, go to the Nexus mods and download the save file that has all the schematics in the entire game and sync it to your golden nug.
last november whilst myself and a couple dozen other players were building the wiki pages and various thread archives on here, I manually added all the 500+ schematics from the base game to a fresh account. Turns out they added a golden nug in one of the later builds after a lot of us ceased playing following the player V moderator flame war that broke out in January. Now all you need to do instead of save scumming is to download the save file and sync it to your nug.