Last Friday I was lying in bed listening to “Bobcaygeon,” as one does. I was half-dreaming about leaving Canada, and missing Canada, and then returning to Canada in middle age with a new perspective on Canada. All my friends were married, or divorced and remarried, and many of them had children. That meant no one had the time to drive me out to the sticks so I could once again imbibe the great country of my birth.

So in this dream, I had to learn to drive. The thought of learning to drive at 57 is humiliating to me now, but at 57, I didn’t care anymore. I had stopped caring about lots of things I care about now, like my own appearance. I saw myself with short, white corkscrew curls and a samosa-shaped midsection. I wore leopard-print mumus and plastic jewelry made to look like organic materials not much more expensive than plastic.

Once I learned to drive, I bought an old car from Craigslist and rode out into the country on my own. But I got lost, and so I rolled down my window and start hollering at the person closest to the vehicle, without even saying excuse me. Because at fifty-seven, the only family I had left were the voices in my own head, and I had ceased to regard other people as more than supporting characters in my own psychic Seinfeld. And at their voices rang with that Aryan twang, I jolted upright and yelped, and the person I was with murmured, “Don’t worry, you probably won’t live past fifty.”

I was dreaming of the spinster bogeywoman version of myself, drawn from bad stereotypes and personal fears. I was also predicting the outcome of life patterns that have already started. For example, on Sunday I went out to buy a granola bar from the 7/11. I threw a coat over the oversized tube dress I slept in and didn’t bother putting on a bra. Once outside, I realized that the coat had squished my entire front section into a porridgey wall of breast. And I muttered “this is disastrous,” and then I realized that “disastrous” isn’t a word I would normally say, and then I almost had a panic attack.

Even as women have become more comfortable finding purpose in their careers, and less afraid of dying alone, we remain disturbed by the stereotype of the baggy old spinster. At least I am. Every time I’m in a public washroom, and some beaming woman in orthopedic shoes comes in and just does her business like I’m not even there, and every time some crazy-haired woman at the organic grocery store starts complaining to the clerk about the price of applesauce while the lineup stacks behind her, I think, Wow, that’s what happens to women with no partners or kids to nag at. They drift off from the mainland on one-women rafts made of polar fleece and canned goods.

That’s a terrible assumption, of course. Lots of these women probably have partners and kids. Probably their partners and kids would be just as strange to me as they are, and would make me just as uncomfortable if I had to share a washroom with them. And for every woman who freaks me out, there are a hundred women who buy their groceries like everyone else and do the thing women do where they draw their feet in so no one can identify them by their shoes, and wait until everyone has left the washroom before doing whatever it is they need to do. Or who use the washroom normally and maybe hash it out with clerks once in a while, but who remain productive members of society.

I’m not haunted by them. I am haunted by the bogeywoman who is the exception. I worry about becoming her the same way teenagers worry about becoming office lackeys, without realizing that almost everyone who isn’t a teenager works in an office, or thinks maybe they should be working in an office, and most of them don’t look anything like Ziggy.

I don’t worry so much about being a spinster. I am twenty-five. I am also happily single, and not all that concerned about having kids or finding a partner for life. I worry more about what will happen when all my friends find partners and assume responsibilities that preclude them from spending much time with me. I worry about being totally alone, and I worry about how much alone time it will take before the voices in my head become audible, and inanimate objects start embodying the friends I no longer have, and my Archie doll becomes like Wilson. I don’t sleep with my Archie doll. Just thought you should know that.

I worry more about what I’ll be like when I am a spinster, not that I’m old enough to worry about that. I’m old enough, though, to realize that the real-life bogeywomen who have given up on society do not see themselves the way I do. They don’t give a shit what people think. They give a shit about feeling comfortable and scoring deals on preserves. I should want to be more like them, the same way I should have wanted to be more like that guy I once saw in sweatpants and wearing a shoelace for a headband, flanked by two attractive women.

The difference between the spinster bogeywoman and the man with the shoelace headband is that fewer people admire her. People don’t think it’s punk rock to scream at bystanders for directions from the inside of a mumu. But maybe it is. I have to make an effort, starting now, to pay the spinster bogeywoman the respect she deserves, so that when I’m finally a spinster bogeywoman I don’t have to feel ashamed of what the twenty-five-year-old me would have thought.

Time has shown that younger me is an idiot, anyway. The sixteen-year-old me is ashamed that I’m working in an office instead of playing in a lo-fi band and living in a squat.

Alexandra Molotkow writes Toronto Standard’s Minutiae column. Follow her on Twitter at@alexmolotkow.

For more, follow us on Twitter @TorontoStandard or subscribe to our newsletter.