Horror movie

As miserable as my life has been during every decade of it, I was fortunate enough to have a few years in my late 20s when I could, and did, work hard at a job that I liked and have some fun with people around my age.

My experience of being in my late 20s was that I was smarter than I'd been when I was a teenager but no less healthy and about as beautiful.  I also knew enough to recognize that I was at the end of what can really be considered youth.  I decided not to waste those years, and I didn't.  I didn't try to recapture the past.  I didn't fear the future.

I did NOT live those years in terror of turning 30.

I did NOT live those years researching cosmetic surgery or other procedures or testing every anti-aging product on the market.

I did NOT live those years dieting, excessively exercising, or obsessing about marriage.  I would have liked to have had a boyfriend; not being able to have that relationship was painful, but I don't blame myself for it anymore.  Vermont was too small of a place for me to meet people whom I could have been happy dating for a long time.

It is sad and enraging for me that the conglomerate has ravaged the last near-decade of my life, and that it continues to ravage my last years of fertility by forcing me to live in poverty, isolation and humiliating degradation.

The one thing that I never seem to run out of is bad luck.  An exception to this is that I didn't grow up in or around the entertainment industry, and I have a totally different value system than people who do.  Nothing that the conglomerate, in all of its shades of misogyny, does to me or says about me, disrupts my goals for my life, although the conglomerate is doing everything that it can to prevent me from achieving those goals.  I want to be educated.  I want to be working.  I'd like to date, and maybe be married, and if I'm not going to be a mother I want that to be a decision that I have made and not a decision that is forced on me by the conglomerate's relentless, smug, self-absolving persecution.  Maybe nothing that I do will ever stop the wrong things that are inflicted on me, but nobody can make me think that those things aren't wrong.  

I will not date or marry an abuser.  I will not help the conglomerate to feel better about its horrific abuse of me by acquiescing to be the subject of its disgusting jokes about me.  I do not need the conglomerate's approval.  I do not need the conglomerate or anyone else to think or say or lie that I am as beautiful now as I was when the abuse began.  I'm not a character named Lena Kochman.  I have nothing to live up to other than fundamental standards of right and wrong, and I have nothing to prove, least of all to people who have irreparably harmed me, who have immensely enjoyed doing so, and who talk the talk all day while their victims do the walking.