I sat outside the exam hall with my sandwich still wrapped in my bag

Dear Delyara, I’m a mature student, and today I was so nervous I couldn’t eat. All around me were younger students revising, laughing, scrolling, looking irritated in the ordinary way people do when they still assume that exams belong naturally to this stage of life. I sat there feeling my age, my fear, my rent, my unfinished washing, my late-night studying, my children, my whole complicated adult life pressed into one plastic chair outside that room. I passed the exam eventually. That’s not what stayed with me. What stayed with me was how alone I felt in those twenty minutes before we went in — not because no one was around, but because nobody else there seemed to be carrying all the extra decades, responsibilities, and private doubts I had brought with me.