Another of those lesser perils of social interaction.

You’re walking with a new hiking group, on a trail that will lead you under overpasses, across bridges, along creeks. Fortunately, it seems most of the group are newcomers, too! They’re all exchanging pleasantries—Hi! What’s your name? Where are you coming from? What do you do?—and you do so too.

“Hi, what’s your name?”

“Dana. And you?”

“I’m Grace. Nice to meet you!”

And then you and Dana chat for a bit. She’s really into portraiture. The trail’s not very wide, so the group naturally forms a procession of twos. Eventually, despite your best efforts, Dana figures out that she and you don’t have very much in common, because you don’t know the first thing about portraiture, but she hears the two women in front of you chatting animatedly about photography and then she deftly slides herself into their conversation.

And now you’re left alone. You’re an odd one out. You try to keep up with Dana and the other photography women but you can’t generate a single intelligent thing to say about their hobby. You open your handbag and fish out your water bottle. You drink from it, a lazy sip which you prolong so you can stave off, for a short while, that feeling of looking awkward for being an odd one out. You tuck away the water bottle leisurely into your handbag.

All the while, you’re also eavesdropping on the two women behind you, trying to find a clever opening for you to insinuate yourself into their conversation. But they’re talking about product management and you can barely understand what product management even is on a good day. They’re very into it, their sentences overlapping in a way that suggests that stopping to welcome another interlocutor would kill the flow of the conversation. Nowhere in their discussion does an obvious opening present itself, but you keep a delusional ear on them just in case one does. They don’t notice your furtive glances backward at them once every fifteen or so seconds, much less understand them as social distress signals: hey, I’m kind of alone here! Talk to me!

Although the group was advertised as a hiking group, you actually didn’t come here for the hiking much; you came here for the opportunity to practise socialising. You’re naturally shy. You should be socialising! You glance backward again to assess the rest of the crowd, as if you might spot another loner or have better luck fitting into another conversation, but now it seems everybody else has paired off decisively, there was an odd number of participants, and now you’re stuck alone, for the rest of the hike, or at least until the next stopping point.

What do you do until the next stopping point? You continue marching along, pretending to be completely enraptured by the scenery—it’s actually quite pretty this time of day—and at intervals you rescue your water bottle from your handbag. The disquieting notion pops up that maybe it’s the one rescuing you instead, from your social awkwardness.