“Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild
and precious life?”
That was the last line from a book I recently finished, Spinster by Kate Bolick. For a while now, I’ve considered myself as a spinster or surely on
her way to become one. Committed relationship intrigued and scared me at the
same time. Solitude is the company that I appreciate the most. There’s a
comfort in knowing that you can splurge and dedicate the rest of your life with
whatever things that you are passionate about or so very want to master. Despite
that nagging fear deep inside you, that somehow you’ll die alone and get eaten
by your cats – there is also a charming vision of coming home, setting a table
for one and cook whatever you want to eat, then dedicate yourself to read or
write in silence. Yes, I’ve always thought that solitude is a good friend of
mine.
A close friend of mine recently said something that makes me think
during one of his pensive, single malt-ed mood. He said: “Your days are
numbered. Find your meaning, before dying.” And those words stick with me until
now. I think it is considered lucky if one is able to reach 70, still healthy
and lucid. That leaves this yours truly, more or less 40 years to find her meaning,
grow up (or grow old) to find out what she wants to be in life and choosing the
kind of people that she wants to be with.
The idea of spinsterhood is an intriguing one. Here in Indonesia,
the term that people use is horrendous: perawan
tua or old virgin. To generally assume that an unmarried woman is also a
virgin is just Neanderthal. I think being a spinster is ultimately a challenge
for a society who likes to put people in boxes. Let me quote an enlightening
paragraph from Spinster:
Every year I try to reread Doris Lessing’s slim 1987
polemic, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. In the book, this “epicist of the female
experience”, as the Swedish Academy put it when awarding her the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 2007, reminds us how difficult it is to detach ourselves from the
mass emotions and social conditions of the age we’re born into; all of us, male
and female, are “part of the great comforting illusions, and part illusions,
which every society uses to keep up its confidence in itself.”
To challenge the conformity that everyone (especially women) must be
married and have kids; well, that takes a lot of guts. Anyway, back to the
book, I found that the book speaks to me very personally. Reading Bolick’s
sentences seems to validate my unspoken thoughts. Closing the book, I feel less
alone in being the weird woman who a ‘spinster wish’ as Bolick has charmingly
put it. It is definitely not a manifesto of a single girl who is set against the matrimonial bond. Through five writers and their different set of lives that
have inspired Bolick in her quest to define spinsterhood, I learned that there
are all sort of way to live.
I can be as pretty, witty and sophisticated as Maeve Brennan. I also
can be as progressive as Neith Boyce, or as bold and fiery as Edna St. Vincent Millay.
There is also the choice of being demure and productive as Edith Wharton,
writing her series of New York’s elite and an interior design guide. I can be
any woman that I want. I do have that option. I am so glad that I read this
book when I started my 30s. I have no idea what kind of woman that I will
become in the next decade or so, but I do know that I would like someone to
have this impression of me (New Woman, as described by political writer
Randolph Bourne in one of his letter):
“So thoroughly healthy and zestful ... They shock you
constantly... They have an amazing combination of wisdom and youthfulness, of
humor and ability, of innocence and self-reliance... They are of course all
self-supporting and independent; and they enjoy the adventure of life; the
full, reliant, audacious way in which they go about makes you wonder if the new
woman isn’t to be a very splendid sort of person”
My plan for 2016 and the decades to come are simple: to have one
wild and precious life. Being a spinster or not a spinster, it doesn’t even
matter. I am going to make a rich life of my own.
Label:
adulthood,
being woman,
spinster
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