The Lone Mushroom

As I sit in a comfortable air-conditioned room, 30 minutes before my class starts, the anxiety doesn’t leave me. I see women walking inside, one of them asks “Is this the creative writing course?”, I nod. And I wonder simultaneously, am I going to be the oldest in this class?.

Many walk-in, all women (well to be precise, girls) and all of them seem younger. “Second-year college” “Graduate” “Doing my post-graduation in sociology” and one of the ‘jokes’, so you are like a super senior. I feel awkward and message a friend “I hope the teacher is older than I am” and she types in a LOL and a soothing ‘Relax’.

As the room gets filled with younger people and I sit in the middle of all of them (literally) I start to think. I wish I had the sense to do this course earlier, and the understanding to pursue this at a younger age. I am still finding my professional feet. I feel like the lone mushroom I found on an adventurous trail in Barog. I can’t find anyone sailing my boat, which can be comforting. The conversations, inside and outside my head, are broken when my teacher walks in. She is older (thank god). I thank my stars she skipped the chirpy “Oh, let us introduce ourselves”.

In walks a boy, which makes even the teacher state the obvious “Oh, you are the only boy in this class” and I think, wait a minute! He is the lone mushroom. The ONLY boy in a class of 30. For the next 10 minutes, I stop listening to what the teacher has to say and go on a journey riding on my thoughts. All of us are the lone mushroom. We all feel lost and like an outsider some time or the other. For some, it is worse because people point that out to you not so eloquently. In that room, each and every person was an outsider in some way to this course. One has not read a book in her life, one runs a fashion label and has never written in life, one is studying business, one plays professional poker and so on. Everyone is an outsider in his or her own right.

The lone mushroom, though an outsider on the lush green trail, caught my fancy on that long trail. ‘Outsiders’ make for a beautiful part of the trail of life...