How to be a single woman in hard times?

Some years ago I had an idea to create “a podcast of a 30 years old single woman”. I wanted to share my experience and get answers to my questions from other women of my age who live alone like me.

How to find friends when living in a foreign country and working from home? Is drinking alone a problem for a single woman? Should I keep in touch with my mother if she wasn’t a good mother but now my son needs a grandmother?

Some of my questions may have been naive, but I was just a white educated woman from a big city.

In turn, I was feeling a desire to share my knowledge. I could talk about my experience in searching for a hobby or raising a kid as a single mother. I could tell that “to be out of politics” is bad for a woman and why a steam mop can be more calming than a Satisfyer.

Weeks went by, I never found the time for a podcast. I had to deal with my questions on my own. However, some of them remained unanswered and some of them have become irrelevant (I am no longer single and alone).

One day, my homeland started a war with a neighboring country. This drew the toughest sanctions from other countries. Two weeks after the war began, I lost all projects I worked for and all my bank cards turned into mere pieces of plastic. I also no longer could do business with companies from my home country, so I started to look for a new way of living.

My partner, my son and I left the place where we lived and settled down on the outskirts of a major city in Mexico.

In a desert area, surrounded by cacti and Joshua trees, we started over.

After two weeks in our new home, we found out about disappearances of women and girls in the area. More than 20 women went missing during the past month. Some of them were found dead.

“Don’t go out alone! If you go somewhere, go with your husband. Don’t trust taxi drivers, even if you got a taxi on app, they can rape you. Don’t think that if you are with a kid, they won’t touch you!” — my neighbor said.

So that’s how my life changed in a few weeks. Before, I lived in a world where you could be an independent woman who pays her bills on your own. Now you can’t go out without a man.

I know that some have faced this in the previous years of the pandemic. I only feel this today.

This is the first and the main question for my new blog “of a woman who is not single and currently not independent”: how to be a single woman in such hard times?

How to live alone when you can be kidnapped or raped by a taxi driver? How to live alone when you don’t know what to expect from life? How would you answer?