Author: Jhilmil Rathore (Student Volunteer) | 20th December 2025
The graduation photos look like a promise. Everyone in a neat line, tassels caught mid-swing, faces lit with that strange, exhausted joy but except I felt the lack of it.
There’s a particular kind of terror that arrives after you cross that stage. It’s unlike what you see and hear about in movies or Instagram stories. It’s not loud or cinematic; it’s quiet and domestic. Something unseen and unnamed becomes the centre of your attention, and because it has no shape you give it all the shapes—bad ones, most of them. The architecture of your inner life, the scaffolding that used to make sense of hunger, motivation, and plans, loosens. Where there used to be a hallway leading room to room—class to exam to project—there is now a dark corridor with no lights. You want to walk, but your feet won’t move.
It is almost deranged how the unknown can undo us. Not because it is monstrous — it usually isn’t — but because our minds prefer scaffolding so fiercely that their absence feels like collapse. You are terrified of what could happen, and yet you are paralyzed by that very terror. You watch opportunities drift by like birds and feel unable to reach for any. Numbness becomes a companion: you can’t quite feel joy and you can’t quite feel steady fear either. You float somewhere in between, unsettled by the present and haunted by a future you cannot picture.
The thing about fear of the unknown and letting go of what is familiar that you don’t know what you will be doing in the future and the thought may excite and make you anxious at the same time. It was and will always be easier when you are in your safe space staying right where you already are, but to step out of it, putting yourself in an uncomfortable place is something that really poses as a challenge. This really reminds me of us as babies, when we would comfortably sleep holding our mother’s dupatta that held her scent, and how it provided us with a comfort that was hard to let go.
What I want to say, to myself and to anyone else who feels this flush of anxiety after college, is that paralysis is not proof of incapability or worthlessness. From having your whole life decided for you from birth to nursery to school to college. It is perfectly normal to suddenly feel tensed about what is next?
There’s also a strange generosity in not knowing. If the future were already written, we would not be able to surprise ourselves with new loves, new skills, or quiet reinventions. Anxiety narrows the field of possibility, but possibility still exists—messy, unphotogenic, and honest, something that you probably wouldn’t see on LinkedIn posts. If you feel the same way after your graduation, give yourself the time to be patient and kind to yourself – also the permission to do and not to do anything until the voice within you allows. Let the days be imperfect. Let the plans be experiments. You do not have to know the whole map to take one step. The future will not be a single event that defines you; it will be a series of small, sometimes clumsy choices that add up. And in the quiet between the tassel’s swing and the next breath, you might find a surprising capacity for resilience you never suspected you had.