The Spleen Monologues

Here's something to start my week with. It's an excerpt from Jessica Zafra's Spleen Monologues. I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I have.

I am often asked: What is your problem?

Let me ask you the same question: What is your problem?

When you look in the mirror you will feel a deep, unquenchable discontent because no matter what products or services you buy, you will never, ever look the way the TV commercials and magazines say you should. The cosmetics, fashion. health and fitness industries are sustained by your eternal dissatisfaction and the pernicious self-loathing that is called "self-improvement."

You work for a person you do not respect, whose main qualification is that he is related or somehow connected to the powers that be in your professional universe. You take orders from someone of lesser ability, who criticizes your work because he knows that you know he doesn't deserve his position, and dammit, just because he can. The promotion that should've gone to you goes to someone whose ability to suck up to the boss would shame the most powerful vacuum cleaner. You stay in a job you hate, among the people you can't stand, because you have bills to pay and a lifestyle you have to maintain whether or not you actually like it.

You receive advice you don't want from people who say that they care about you and have your best interests at heart, but are actually using you to delude themselves that their lives are wonderful. (They need you more than you need them, ever think of that? Without poor little you to give advice to, who would they be superior to?)

You are considered a loser because you refuse to compromise your standards and settle for whoever is willing and available. You are called immature by people who jumped on the first warm body that happened along because they were afraid to be alone.

You are judged not on your merits but on externals. Your clothes. Your car. Your looks. Your possessions. Your address. Your friends, the people you claim to be your friends, the people you think are your friends. The club you belong to. You are defined by the furnishings in your house, the model of your car, the version of your software, the size of your cellphone, the labels of your clothes, the restaurants you dine in, the television sitcoms you watch, the new spiritual philosophies you subscribe to. "This is you," the salesperson say with a cloying smile, holding up a product worth exactly one-fiftieth its price, and somewhere in the back of your mind you know that this is not you, but you take out your credit card and bury yourself deeper in debt because you can't afford not to buy what everyone else is buying. Better to be in the hock than to be different. There is safety in numbers.

You are under pressure to follow trends which, in the minute they become trends, are on their way to obsolescence. You are required to eat food that is supposed to make you live longer, but which is so tasteless you wonder why people would want to live longer. You get rid of being called Fatty, so you follow diets and exercise regimens to lose weight, when it is a fact of life that you will gain all the weight back and more.

You see stupidity, self-delusion and arrogance everywhere you turn.

When people say "Be yourself," they mean you should be more like them. When they say "It's ok to be different" they neglect to add, "But not too different".

And when you vent your anger, people shrug their shoulders and say, "That is the way things are, there's nothing you can do about it".

Between you and me, I'm the happy one.