Nobody said growing up would be easy, but nobody said it would be this hard. Every new birthday brings us new challenges, but something definitely changes the moment you turn 18. The second you finish high school, people expect you to have your entire life figured out. Life-altering decisions are placed on you; you have to make a decision for your entire future, what you want to do with your life. You are investing so much money, time, and energy, so making a wrong decision is just something you cannot afford.

God forbid you cannot figure out what to do with yourself; you enter this loop of self-pity, despondency, and self-destruction. One moment, you have so much to do, so many deadlines to meet, but when you decide not to make a decision in haste, not to ruin your life, not to be miserable with your future and just take a break, the next moment you are totally free. You have all this spare time you don’t know what to do with, so you do the one thing you are best at: overthinking.

You see your peers move on with their lives, enter new phases of life, do productive, fruitful things, make new friends, get ahead of you, and this almost makes your composure come undone. Every family gathering, every encounter with your relatives makes you think of yourself as a failure. They ask you what you are doing, what your plans are, what degree you are getting, what place you are thinking of going to, but you don’t have any answer, for your mental fog can’t let you think of anything. Your brain feels blank, like an empty canvas. Seeing other kids having figured out everything, you feel unravelled; you feel like a train off its tracks.

Wasted potential — that is what you start thinking of yourself. Your once-shiny wheels start rusting. Thinking you fell behind all your classmates makes you bitter; you say and do a lot of things you know you will regret. Your head is filled with all this poison, your heart is full of doubt. You dread waking up because there is nothing to do, but you dread sleeping more, because it’s more challenging not to lose your mind while trying to sleep. You feel like a zombie in your own body. You are only people-watching; you look at other people and try to live through them vicariously, but it does not help.

At one point you start wondering if all your cages were mental, but it’s too late now, because you are already wasted by your destructive habits, like all your potential. You start depending on others for everything, you lose any and all confidence, you start waiting for others to come and fix you up. No one sees or realises that the bare minimum you do is you trying your best to keep it together. Your days become so mundane. You don’t leave your house; you just feel empty.

Before all of this, you thought you had done enough, and you thought that was the cure for any failure, but now you realise nothing is ever enough. It feels like you have toxins in your bloodstream, the kind nothing can suck out, all because your head is full of destructive thoughts.

The good thing about hardships is that they always come to an end. It takes time, but once you accept your situation, try to make the best of it, and realise that sometimes giving up is the strong thing and that to run is the brave thing, you find that such experiences are often the ones that end up leading you to the right thing.