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Show Kathleen Norris Says: Politics Cures Loneliness Bell Syndicate. WNU Features There you'll find spectacled women, women with bulbous noses, smart and stupid women, fat and thin, dowdy and stylisfu By KATHLEEN NORRIS SHE is 31. She is alone in the world, living in a one-room one-room apartment in a big city. She is plain her nose, she says, is inclined to look shiny and bulbous,- she wears glasses and her color is too high in winter win-ter when her hands and feet get cold and her face hot. She has few friends because most of her friends have married and gone away from the business busi-ness world into home-making, wifehood and motherhood. - Gertrude White feels herself a failure. She is very unhappy. She went to a psychoanalyst, but all lie told her in seven sessions was to try to forget a lonely and handicapped handi-capped childhood and a self-sacrificing youth and assert herself and her potential of happiness and success. suc-cess. "I like men, but am horribly shy and self-conscious when in their company. I try to think of subjects interesting to them, but succeed only in making such artificial arti-ficial remarks that my purpose is perfectly obvious and they either answer briefly or wander away to some other woman." "You don't know," Gertrude's letter continues, "how I envy women wom-en luckier than I in the way they seem to know how to live. Their, simplest achievements seem miraculous mirac-ulous to me having men buzz about them at dances; receiving invitations, attentions, offers of marriage; going through all the steps of engagement and marriage and then proudly taking their places in the social group as wives and mothers. I don't know how to get started. I know I could be loving and capable if I had a chance. I've never had a chance." Can't Make Friends "Please don't tell me," she finishes, fin-ishes, "to show men simple friendliness friend-liness and interest and forget myself my-self in trying to win their friendship that's just what I dol Please don't tell me to enlarge my interests and join a class of some kind. Because Be-cause I did, with the hope that it would bring new contacts into my life. The only friends I made in a Spanish class were an old man and his wife, who stuck to me so that everyone thought them my father and mother. And even they never asked me to their home! "I want terribly to find myself. I don't want to die, 30 years from now, never having lived." All right, Gertrude, I will not malce you the usual suggestions of charity work in some hospital or community house or study in some night class. I will ask you to do two things. The last woman to whom I gave this recipe was in a bad way, indeed. in-deed. She had gone down to the lowest depth a woman can plumb. Ridden by physical disease and a consuming hunger for drugs, she staggered into my life 10 years ago. Now she lives in Texas, raises Shetland ponies and has a good husband. hus-band. She is a happy, successful woman. My suggestion to Inez was this same one to go into a church every day, sit thinking for a while and then kneel to say only the brief prayer. "CREATE A NEW HEART IN ME, O GOD." This prayer never via SI19 it very unhappy ... PRAYER HELPS Although many books have been written on the subject, very feio people enjoy en-joy living alone. By nature men and women are gregarious. gregar-ious. They thrive on their associations with other people, families, children and a fruitful, rewarding home life. Gertrude White is 31, unmarried, un-married, lonely and feels tliat she is an utter failure because she has been unable to share in the liappiness of a marriage. Miss Norris advocates that Gertrude appeal to God for help through humble, sincere prayer. She herself must not remain dormant but should attend political meetings where the furor of debate will cause her to forget for-get her shy?iess. goes unanswered. My further advice ad-vice to you is that you get interested inter-ested in politics. We need women in politics. They have their faults, but they are different from the men's faults and make for refreshing refresh-ing changes. Attend Political Meetings Go to political meetings. Not the Important ones; but the little insignificant in-significant ones of which there are 10 notices in your newspaper this very day. Go into unfamiliar neighborhoods. Talk to the intense men and women nearest you. They'll be much too interested in the program to pay much attention to you personally, but they'll love to tell you what it's all about. The rougher, the plainer and grimier the meeting, the more you're apt to find yourself taking sides. You'll forget your shyness and loneliness and presently find yourself swept along to Harry's or Johnnie's for coffee and sinkers, still talking. There is nothing in the world more stimulating. The day you stand up and hear your own voice saying aloud, "I entirely disagree with the last speaker ," you will realize that the Lord really has heard your prayer and created a new heart in you. Inasmuch as you have the advantage of a fine education and have been a teacher, you may be nominated as spokesman or delegate dele-gate to other meetings and find yourself In a way you never dreamed possible. Look at the women at these meetings, meet-ings, the women at parent-teacher meetings and the women flocking out of church on Sunday morning. There you'll find spectacled women, women with bulbous noses, smart and stupid women, fat and thin, dowdy and stylish all successfully married and many the mothers of children. They didn't do it on their looks. They gained what they have gained because they realized from their very girlhood days that men are like women, too thin, fat, stupid, smart, shy, inhibited, lonely and that most of them want to find mates. But since the start is so hard for you in your own group, go to some good, rowdy meetings, where everyone talks to everyone else, and breaks the ice. Good luck to you! TRAVEL ABROAD INCREASES WASHINGTON. More Americans Ameri-cans than ever are planning to travel abroad despite the troubled political situation over there. Trans - Atlantic steamship passenger pas-senger volume Is 25.5 per cent above last year's. Air travel has increased 31.2 per cent and it looks now as though seats for the Atlantic At-lantic trip will be in greater demand de-mand this year than last year. The state department said applications appli-cations for passports are increasing. |