Stuck Voyage of 20's

Avantika was in her third year of Business Studies, and yet — somewhere deep down — she still believed being an adult meant having it all figured out.

As a child, she used to play teacher-teacher in her living room, wrapping her mother's dupatta like a saree and scribbling marks in an imaginary register. In that moment, she wasn't just a kid — she was the strong, independent woman who walked into classrooms in heels and knew all the answers. No one questioned her. No one made her feel small.

She loved it.

Back then, adulthood was a dream — clean apartments, coffee mugs, confident voices, and freedom from school uniforms and exams.

No one told her it would be anything else.

Especially not the grown-ups.

In Indian households, adults were portrayed like gods with jobs — self-reliant, responsible, resilient. The culture glorified endurance. No one talked about burnout. No one said, "It's okay to not have it all together in your 20s." The silent message was always: once you grow up, you cope. You adjust. You smile.

So Avantika grew up chasing that illusion — wanting to grow up faster, to finally wear the ID card instead of the school badge, to be someone who "had it all under control."

But now, here she was — 21, sitting in her third-year classroom, staring blankly at a screen full of marketing strategies — wondering how it all became this complicated.

She sighed.

"This wasn't the plan…" she thought.

The delusion was starting to crack — slowly, gently — like the first line on a mirror that had held too many reflections for too long.

It wasn't that she hated adulthood.

She just didn't expect it to be this… messy.

Responsibilities crept in like background noise. The pressure to be productive. The uncertainty of the future. The sudden dips in self-worth on days when nothing felt right. Avantika had imagined roses — but she hadn't accounted for the thorns.

"Do all adults feel this lost and just pretend they're okay?" she wondered.

Because if they did, they were damn good at pretending.

She glanced at her classmates — some smiling, some furiously typing notes, some scrolling through reels under the desk. No one looked as confused as she felt.

Or maybe they were just better at hiding it.

That was the thing about delusion. It doesn't break all at once. It fades — one unnoticed moment at a time.

And without realizing it, Avantika had already stepped into the very world she once fantasized about. The imaginary heels were gone. The grown-up glow had dimmed.

This was the real thing now.

And it was nothing like the movies.

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