Breathe
By Diana J. Torres
It is very strange to "be" single (and without children) at 42. I feel that there is a part of culture, of social opinion, of collective thinking that should drive me to sadness, to failure or to the arms of any idiot in my same situation to assemble an emergency family group, improvised, unwanted, plagued by dissatisfaction and mistakes. But curiously I am in one of the happiest stages of my existence and I try not to be affected or conditioned by what was supposed to be me. I was in a couple, basically connecting one partner with another, from the age of 17 until a year ago, that is 24 years of my life! It's too much! And the first year of being single (oh I hate that word but it's so ugly that it doesn't even have synonyms) it was all very strange, I couldn't find myself; gradually I realized that the immense amount of care and attention I put in my partner now turned out to be a huge surplus of time and energy, and for a while I didn't know what to do with it. Fortunately no other person willing to be my partner showed up at that time because I would not be writing this and my life would not have taken the radical turn that has made me so happy.
