The road more travelled

It's been hard to avoid a sense of being left behind lately. Everyone seems to be sorted out, whether it's in relation to their careers, their finances, their relationships, or their families. Everyone, that is, except me, stuck in a place where I feel that I've never completely grown up.

Of course, there are advantages to not growing up. You can get away with star fishing in a massive bed, because you're not sharing it with anyone. You can spend your time however you want to; if there's a TV show you want to watch, the only thing that might stop you is another equally appealing show being on at the same time. Your sleep is undisturbed, and you never have to fight for the bathroom. You owe nothing to anybody, unless of course you've borrowed it first. If you want to take off to the other side of the world, the only thing stopping you is your bank balance. Yes, there are definite good points.

But the bad seems to be out weighing the good recently. In my family, I still feel like the little kid. I'm the only one left who is not partnered up, one of the only two without children and a marriage. Even my younger cousins are now all married. My younger sister-in-law is due to pop out her second child sometime in the next couple of weeks; the cousin a year younger than me is not far behind her with her first. My boss earns twice the cash that I do, owns two houses and has a partner that she is planning a family with; she's three years older than me. My closest friends either own homes or are looking to buy. They are in jobs that they enjoy, and they're well paid. Many of them are also in relationships.

And then there's me.

I'm single, with no prospects on the horizon. I am extremely badly paid in a job that, on a good day, I tolerate but never love. I have no idea what to do with my life, and have been drifting along without hope of improvement for years now, dabbling around the edges of the problems but too chicken to actually do something that will decide one way or another for me. I tried living on my own, and found that I could barely keep my nose above the financial waters, so had to go back to sharing a house. Although I am older than at least half of my female relatives, I do not have a family of my own; wanting does not bring anything into effect in that area, and my existence is too precarious to risk a solo effort. While everybody else seems to have progressed in at least one area of their life, I have comprehensively wallowed.

It's tough being alone in this world, too. Everything is geared towards couples, from travel to restaurants, to advertising, to radio competitions. Couples and families. The assumption was always that I would have been married and settled by now, a couple of kids in tow. It hasn't happened - not just for me, but for many women I know. Failing that, I was going to have dazzled literary circles with my writing, designed award winning houses, done something to have an impact on the world, rather than becoming the person who holds up people's dream homes because their design is 10cm too close to a boundary. I was supposed to at least make enough cash that I would be able to afford my own place, somewhere to hide my miserable self. It seems that I have failed comprehensively.

I usually try not to get down about things beyond my control; if I did, I'd be in a permanent state of misery. But today, for some reason, I have succumbed to the temptations of chocolate and junk food, to misery, fear, and loneliness. Tonight, it seems too hard to keep up the smiling face of the fat person, the cliche of crying within is ringing a little too true. Tonight, I feel that everybody else is moving forwards, and I'm going backwards. About the only signs of increasing maturity are the soft laughter lines around my eyes, and what I'm starting to believe are silver, rather than golden, strands that occasionally reveal themselves in the thick mass of my hair. I'm tired of pretending that I don't care, that it doesn't hurt to see someone with the life I pictured for myself.

Tonight, of not on other nights, the walls can come down a little, and I can say, with complete honesty, that family functions are a bitter pill to swallow. I may gripe about them a little at other times, but the reason never really comes out. The truth is, that when my outspoken, bitter and twisted grandmother comes out with her barbed comments about weight, about the idea that I have ruined my life by travelling instead of settling down, there are times when I almost believe that she's right. There are times when I look at the life of my cousin, my oldest and probably closest friend, and, whatever I think of her husband, I wonder why that never comes to me. When I look around the table of coupled up people, and find myself seated opposite Nana, as the only other single around the table, and I wonder if this is what life will be like for always, the sense that everybody else is happy, and I alone am not. And you have to wonder, where did it all go wrong? Was it in wanting things that were never meant for me? Or was it in trying too hard to do everything, to be everything? Perhaps it was in wanting it all, and not narrowing my focus. Or maybe it was just never the right thing for me and I'm pining for things that would never make me any happier than I am right now.

Or maybe it was in disappearing down a worm hole of 'What if?'