The Spinster's Soliloquy

I wish someone had told me this when I was thirty. I would have been old enough to know there was necessary work to be respectable and elegant, the way I envisioned I would have been by that age.

At thirty, I was someone I couldn’t recognize. I was surviving in ways that didn’t make me the person I wanted to become. I don’t like that person, and I wish I could forget her. At thirty, I almost stopped believing that I was worth the effort. That’s when I stopped taking care of myself.

Six years before that, my parents lost everything. Their dream home. Their nest egg. The future they had planned. For me, this meant taking care of myself. That was never in my plans. I was going to be a spoiled daughter who worked only when I wanted to, until I met the man of my dreams, who wanted to spoil me as much as my daddy did.

I was a high school dropout with severe depression and a mild case of undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder.  Overstimulated and understimulated at the same time. I had no skills, no connections, and no dream man to spoil me.

I couldn’t afford the brand-name clothes I was used to, the professional-quality hair and makeup products, designer perfumes, trips to the salon for hair and nails, eyebrow or bikini waxes. I didn’t even buy contact solution because I was too tired to take out my contacts at night. I couldn’t afford glasses, so I wore the same pair of contacts day and night for a year.

After massage school and skin and makeup school, I got regular work, but it was low-paying. I spent what money I had on pot, smokes, and alcohol. I partied with my cousin every weekend and some weekdays, like we were still in our twenties. Drove drunk and used language like a long-haul truck driver. I let myself bloat with beer and fast food, soda and sugar.

I told myself that I loved being unladylike and trashy. My unkempt eyebrows were making decisions my past self would never have approved of. I didn’t think I was better than anyone else now, and I judged people like my old friends who expected more out of themselves. I talked down to people and made no effort to better my circumstances. I just pretended I didn’t want to be better. Uneducated, fat, and lazy. Stinking of cigarettes. Poor with one straggly eyebrow. My retirement plan was Camel Special Lights and gas station hot dogs.

If someone had told me that I was worth the trouble it took to make myself the person I was supposed to be, I would have glared at them.

Then, later,

I would have cried because I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

It wasn’t until the next decade, and after I sold my home and got rid of all my responsibilities, that I had the confidence to better myself. Isolated and quiet, I had time to make goals and plan how to achieve them. And because I was such garbage at the time, my baby step goals were easy to achieve. Exercise, drink water, get some sun, and get some fresh air. Stop spending time with people who don’t want to do better for themselves. Get out of the echo chamber, hear some other ideas, open my horizons, knock down my cinder block walls.

Eight years later, I’m still not the person I want to be or married to that dream man, but it feels so much better above ground, in the fresh air, with my fresh pair of contact lenses.

I’m still becoming.

And for the first time in my life,

I know I’m worth the trouble.