Do Life Before it's too Late

So, I just got done watching this movie called Carolina. It was made in 2003 and it starred Shirley MacLaine as Grandma Millicent Mirabeau. The one thing that inspired me the most was Grandma’s outlook on life. If she wanted something bad enough, she showed up with a shotgun. That made me laugh so hard. She didn’t take anything from anyone unless it was her way or what she already wanted in the first place and absolutely no one could have hurt that woman unless they died and she loved them.

Now, that is the kind of woman I wish I had been my whole life. I wish so many things about myself. I pray and ask God over and over again to please, let me go back and try life again. Maybe I would do it right this time. What are my regrets you ask? Well, my kids and not doing right by them, my parents and not doing right by them and last but not least, myself and not doing right by me.

I think I know the exact moment that I realized that I was a misfit. It was the moment I walked into Lincoln Elementary 6^th grade class. All the kids in that class were expecting a new kid and they knew she was a girl. So, everybody was hoping for some movie star looking perfect beauty queen and in walked me.  A curly headed little orphan Annie looking girl except chubby. I remember that moment exactly and how all the kids looked at me and then immediately looked back down at their desks. You could hear the disappointment in the room. It was deafening to me.

That was the defining moment in my life that made me realize that, I was alone. Oh, I had a family, and oh how I loved my family and they loved me. But, in that moment, I realized that I was going to have to do something incredible to ever be anything but…a misfit. I have been trying ever since to be and do something special in this world and as much as I tried the more I failed.

Now here I sit in a mobile home in Missouri, nowhere to go. No friends really that I can go and do things with. My kids are grown, haven’t seen my daughter or my grandkids in six years. My body is broken, my brain a big pile of tears, fears, regrets and nowhere to go from there.

Now what do I do with my life? The house sits silent. I can’t just get in my car and drive for many reasons. I have a hard enough time trying to remember what time it is let alone write another book. Now where do I go? Now what do I do? I am only 48 years old and it seems my life is over while the world just moves past.

It’s almost like I want to tell the world out there that as long as you’re thin the world is your oyster. I don’t mean for people, especially kids to think oh I have to be thin to be counted or make it as something in this world; the deal is, like college. When you go out into the world after college the work force does not care what your grade point average was but that you made it through, that you graduated. That is the whole point. College makes you strong enough to endure. That is a big word, endure. And the same with your body, you have to work hard to have a good strong body. It doesn’t just come from the genes you are born with. Life is the same way. You have to work hard to have a good life. You can’t just watch life, you have to go out there and take it by the horns and get life, even if you walk into it looking like little orphan Annie.

Let me be an example of what not to do. Don’t spend your life dreaming or hoping someone else will always take care of you. Get up, get out there and do it yourself while you are still young enough to do it. Otherwise, you will end up sad, alone, depressed with all these disorders and mental, like me. If I can’t do it, maybe I can help someone else do it, live, make it and still be strong way past 48.

For me the best I can do, is hope and pray for my kids, pray and hope for my family, take my meds and sleep. Right now I really am laughing at myself because I really do wish I could sleep but I can’t. So I am writing this, hoping to reach the right person out there somewhere that needed this. You don’t have to be what everyone else is hoping for, but you do have to give all you got to be what you are hoping for and don’t let the rest of the world get to you.

Here’s to you…now go get ‘em.

Love,

Anne M. Thompson.