Here’s a little bit from the mind of a character I might want to develop.
Maybe it was time, she thought with a wince of irony, to settle into her identity. Twenty years ago, she’d seen herself as fit for only a life of forced leisure, perhaps as the wife of some rich man who would never expect her to get her hands dirty with the stuff of working, wages, schedules. She’d had immense help viewing herself in this way. If it had been her own idea, the intoxicatingly luring taste of real life wouldn’t have been so attractive, whispering its promises in her ear. Sudden discovery of her capability wouldn’t have filled her mind with dreams of being a real person one day. She wouldn’t have met with advisors to plot her course or figure out how to bring her desires to life. The flow of new words blossoming from her tongue would have been bitter, not sweet, but they were truly too good to forsake.
But here she was in the present, seeing that everything except the sugar daddy existed. There was simply nothing to talk about — no conversation– no words to share with the everyday people whom she ran across on rare occasions. It hurt deeply to know that she had nothing to contribute or tell anyone. At best, they tolerated her situation. At worst, they treated her as if she had come from an alien planet.
So bring on the watercolors, the music lessons, the multiple languages. These things would have made her happy in the context of a full life. But her identity was of an empty shell, the country club wife without a husband and no more profound or meaningful thoughts than the selecting a new body wash or how to procure the next great fashion. She never made the adjustment but the adjustment had certainly defined her. She had not made her bed but she had little choice but to lie in it. Maybe if she stopped resisting the changes, it could somehow build a better frame than the empty calorie emotions of nothingness.
Etcetera 