The Ad Interim Hope

By Vidyanshi Mittal

Growing up is accepting that living a fulfilling life is not possible, it can only be lived up to the mark where you can count it as untroubled, I’ve realized. For some, even the untroubled is a goal to achieve. We spend all our childhood visualizing adult life through a stark rose-tinted glass, which would be unsurprising given how unexposed the world and its ordeals are to us till that age. Now, I find myself pondering what door would I have to knock on to have my aspirations landed across it. The precise moment is when it dawns on me how lost, clueless, or perhaps detached I can be from the world, my surroundings, and my people. That juncture of time led me to the realization that my life has started to feel as if it is something that is happening to me rather than something I have any role in creating. Every dramatic revelation you read in books starts playing its course in real-time, to which you stand bemused as it does its bittersweet work on your mind, body, and life. The only way out of this remains hope, one thing that I find myself lacking often, yet building up each time it falls away from me. All this, because I know ‘to grow’ might not mean ‘to live,’ but I surely was not going to perish merely existing. 

By Vidyanshi Mittal