Dear Nancy's Daughter~
I see that my dear friend Janet wrote a note to you and I wanted to chime in. Smart intelligent people who make poor choices that affect our lives poorly are everywhere, and I am one of them, too. I'm nearly 50 years old now, and my life is comfortable. For many years it was not comfortable. If I had made different choices earlier in my life, I would be much more than comfortable. But when I was young, my comfort was never further away than today or next week.
I was a very intelligent girl. I went to a private school and got straight A's my entire life. I began smoking when I was 11 years old, and the drinking and pot came about a year later. I moved out of my parent's home when I was 14, and spent a couple of years bumping around foster care. All along I was smart, all along I could have been the head of my class if I had applied myself, but I was way too busy getting high. We used to drive or walk around town going to the best neighborhoods looking at the fanciest houses certain that we were going to live there one day. There was even a castle with a moat! We couldn't afford shoes, how could we ever be that? We had no plan, it was just "going to be". I didn't graduate High School.
I did have several opportunities to go to college. I even applied for and received financial aid one year. I had never spent any time envisioning that I might have a career that would allow me to live the way I wanted to. I knew I didn't need to live in a beautiful house, but I did know that I wanted clean warm dry clothes and food to eat. You can only eat lentils every day for about 2 weeks before you know that you want a little variety.
Eventually, in my 20's I had children and got married. I worked at a grocery store for 8 years, and I rarely earned more than minimum wage. My first child, my daughter, was with a man whom I wasn't married to. He asked for and received custody of her when she was 8 months old. Most people assume I must have been a bad mother, but actually I wasn't. But he was an attorney, and I was between jobs. It wouldn't have mattered how good of a mother I was, he would have won in any case. My bosses at the store changed all of the time, and when they didn't like you they messed with your schedule. For the last two years I worked there, they thought it was funny that they could mess with my head by making me work 10 days on and 4 days off with back to back shifts because they didn't have to pay me overtime because I never actually worked more than five days a "work week". I did it for 28 months. But it was the only way I could see my daughter for the court ordered every other weekend visitation, and I was the only one with health insurance. We lived in HUD housing next to meth dealers. Our cars were broken into and stereos stolen. Our backdoor neighbors threw their garbage over our fence onto the patio. Feral cats sprayed our newspaper every day - we finally gave up and stopped getting the paper. Not to mention they destroyed every set of hub caps we ever had on a car.
In the long run, I was able to stop working. I have muscular dystrophy, so I am disabled in so far as my work skills go. It kills me to meet people who do so much better than I did because they stuck with it in high school and college. Often their basic English skills are poor, their general knowledge is lacking. Even their specialized knowledge is poor. If you go into those tall office buildings downtown, on every floor in every office you will find men who are incompetent nincompoops who are in managerial positions who don't have a clue about how to manage their hair care, let alone their employees. But, early in the game they learned to play along. Go to college and join the right clubs or the right teams. Go to work and play basketball with the boss on Tuesday. Buy a pitcher of beer after work once in a while. They're golden and can't be touched. They pull in 3 figures when they are 30 years old. They live in nice houses, get 6 weeks paid vacation every year and will retire happily when they are 65. They might have two or three different jobs in their entire life. And they are "supported" in their workplaces by women like you and me and Janet who were busy not planning our lives when we were 18 years old, or thinking that we didn't need to have our own plan because a man was going to take care of us.
I know that you are having a hard time and that you have no confidence in your future right now. I hope that you will take some time to look into the types of things you like to do and the things that you are good at and do your best to make that happen. No one can do that for you. Just remember that whatever you choose, even if you choose nothing, is what you get to do for the next 45 or 50 years. You can go to work every day and be challenged and make a difference. Or you can bump around being bored, hoping you have enough money for a pair of shoes that don't leak in the rain and snow.
Just remember, not making a choice is actually making a choice to do nothing. Good luck.
She has a purpose, she'll find it. She just needs to want it badly enough. They all do. Don't get discouraged by this. Just keep the faith. 
