Motivation

Recently I happened to have a talk - or a quarrel, more like - with a fifty year old woman. Now if you get to talk to women of that age, you must know they are going through a little thing called menopause. And it's not nice.

What I realized while discussing with her is that women with menopause are just like any other woman alive, except for the fact that they have a good excuse for everything. They start off by explaining why they suddenly neglect themselves and gain weight, something caused by the consumption of ridiculously needless amounts of food. They are sad. The are not young anymore, they have spent their lives with an insensitive bastard of a husband, a dead end job and a 20 year old daughter (like myself) that should have moved out and ceased to be a burden to them. And to realize all this, they had to get bloody menopause. Or not so bloody after all, no gruesome pun intended.

If you ask them why they got married since they think all men are scum, they will answer that they wanted to have a child, and if you ask them why they wanted a child they will just say "every woman wants to have a child at some point in their lives". Taking this into account, one can easily assume that women are doomed to die miserable either because they had kids, or because they didn't. Kind of an easy way to declare your life a one-way street.

Funniest thing is that, these women, encourage you to follow their lifestyle. Study something that will lead you to a non-creative yet somehow "safe" job. Have as many sexual partners as possible so that you can be all fed-up with relationships when you decide to marry and have kids. Do marry, and do have kids, even if this will eventually turn you into a miserable middle aged person everybody is sick of listening to.

The issue is that these women haven't got any real problems. Their problems are good enough to fill Cosmopolitan's pages, that they enjoy reading and identifying with, but they are not real problems. These women are not starving or slowly dying of some terminal decease, they just refuse to change their ways because they have a convenient excuse when they give up.

Of course you can't have anything you want in your life. Because this is what life is like. What on earth makes women think men do not go through tough dilemmas like we do, and that they never ever led to them because they desire to have a family? Sure, not everybody wants to settle down. But that doesn't mean women desperately have to. Of course men are often stuck in jobs they hate, occasionally married to women they hate, self-conscious because their sexual performance is not what it used to be, since their erection is not an easy task anymore. But because women get to go through menopause and have a raging hormone fest, everything is suddenly worse. As if we don't deal with hormones because of our menstrual cycles our entire freakin' lives.

And now, let me tell you about my mother. She's had her menopause, but not once did she use it as an excuse for her behaviour, that hasn't really changed since she was in her middle twenties. She may be grumpy, she may be gaining weight and fighting with me about it every day because I am worried about her health, she may have to go to work then come back and watch tv all afternoon, but she never ever spilled on me that bullshit about fucking menopause. It's just a phase. It's your choice what you do with it.

We tend to make excuses about everything we do. About men that treated us like trash yet we still love. About not being the best we could be. I, myself, keep making up excuses for being extremely lazy and skipping university everyday. I don't like the outdoors, I am a little stingy when it comes to spending money on outings, I am too bored to get ready to go out, I usually have to wake up early in the morning, and I plain like staying at home and doing nothing. But I still try to fight this. I work out, I get around, I study music. You may say I'm just 20 and life is easy right now, but I do believe it is a matter of will. What about all these middle aged women that go the the gym with me? Those who instead of bitching about their lives in front of another hopeless romantic soap opera volunteer to do charity work? Those who lose their husbands in that fragile age yet still fight to bring up children?

This whole issue made me think of my ways a lot as well. A week ago, I wanted to die. I still see my life as a dead end, and if it goes on the way I expect it to, I will probably never kill myself. But I certainly will try to make the best of it while I'm at it, instead of trying to figure out a good enough reason for my idleness. Peace.