My Gripe

I am not a person who complains a lot. Generally, I am a happy person, at least, inwardly, not a bubbly extrovert, but, happy.

There is one thing that annoys me, however: the amount of competitiveness that there is in the world. I do not blame the internet for it. That existed long before the internet. It is just an ugly trait of human nature.

Some people are chatty, others are quiet. There is nothing wrong with either. Some need to work in a factory of three hundred people, others prefer to work alone. Again there is nothing wrong with either.

I have always been a quiet person. Every school report mentions that I kept myself to myself. Most days, I went to (secondary) school alone. There were times when some girls used to ask me to accompany them on the journey to school and, of course, I accepted; it would have been churlish to refuse, but, rather than indulge in conversation with them, I preferred to listen in silence.

When I reached the age of eighteen, most of the visitors who came to our house, started talking about marriage. At that age, I was little more than a child myself and had never thought of marriage. I had to sit in silence and endure endless insinuations that it was time that I got married and had children. It was very annoying and went on for a number of years.

I never imagined that people chose to make my life so miserable. My family, well-meaningly, told me never to divulge my age after I reached twenty, but what if the people who asked me were somewhat related to me, e.g. their grandmother and my grandmother were first cousins? Before you ask me how come that those people who asked me my age did not know it, I can honestly say that I have relatives on the other side of the family, whose children and even some grandchildren I have met and I am sure that their parents, who knew me from child onwards, would tell them my age anyway, so what is the point of trying to conceal my age when there are people who know me for too long to know that I am not a teenager anymore and that they would tell their children how old I am anyway? In other words, people would find out how old I am anyway, whether I hide it from them or not.

Being single and childless at sixty-three is somewhat unusual, but why should I have married and had children "just in order to fit in with the world?" I have no maternal instincts, so I am not sure how good I would be to that child, so it is good that I chose to remain single and childless.