Shelly > Shelly's Quotes

“I’m an open book,” I say, thinking of all the men who have found it illegible. I made mistakes with these men. I dove for their legs as they tried to leave my house. I chased them down the hall with a bottle of Listerine, saying, I can be a beach read, I can get rid of all these clauses, please, I’ll just revise.”
― Raven Leilani , Luster

“How far one will stray to find a new home?”
― Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

“Or maybe I’m not a monster at all; maybe I’m just the result of a life of work, another human being maintaining the status quo out of pure laziness, and now I appropriate other people’s ideas the way older people used to appropriate mine. Maybe I’m just another stagnant adult who’s lost the energy to change things. Something that, come to think of it, might make me the worst sort of monster.”
― Beatriz Serrano, El descontento

“I don’t know where they get all that rage, that competitiveness, that way of seeing and dividing the world into winners and losers. I find it strange how some men use war and sports terminology when they’ve never been in a war and haven’t kicked a ball since high school. Preparing for battle, winning the war, destroying the enemy. How can they see themselves as soldiers and warriors when they’re inside apartments filled with gray IKEA furniture with greasy paper bags from Just Eat piling up in their dirty kitchens? How are they capable of dissociating between the little men they are and the great men they were promised they would become? I think about whether they’re loved by someone, who that could be, and in what way. Who would be the woman—because they’re always women—to make herself smaller so that a man can continue seeing himself as big? Big like Alexander the Great, like Julius Caesar, like Christopher Columbus. Big like all those glorious epics they’ve been imbibing since their earliest infancy. I think about how those men are capable of fooling themselves, but, most of all, how they manage to get the world to sustain that deception. I think about whether at night, right before going to sleep, they feel like impostors or if they’ve swallowed their own lie and sleep like babies. No one talks back to them, no one contradicts them, no one tells them to shut up. No one says that “step up or step aside” is a total crock of shit. And so, it’s almost normal that those men think of themselves as warriors, because by molding the world to their delusions of grandeur, they’ve already won their own battle.”
― Beatriz Serrano, El descontento

“I feel that today I can adopt that personality. Be the shark, the winner; take on the personality of women who’ve turned work into some sort of sacred virtue, the way motherhood used to be, and who hang up photos in their offices with the hashtag #GirlBoss. I’ll turn into capitalism’s idea of a feminist for the next eight hours. An überwoman who can handle everything. The kind who has routines from five to nine and then from nine to five. Some sort of cyborg promoted by business schools, with all the positive qualities associated with women but without any of the bad ones: the disciples of Sheryl Sandberg who want to break the glass ceiling with their stiletto heels and leave the broken glass on the floor for the South American cleaning lady to deal with, and whose idea of equality is having a parking spot in the fancy area reserved for the executive board.”
― Beatriz Serrano, El descontento

“What neither that doctor nor the therapist understood was that the stress was caused not by what I did at my job but, as I’d tried to explain to him, by having to go to work. Spending eight hours from Monday to Friday on alienating and unsatisfying tasks, surrounded by people with whom I was forced to have futile and boring conversations full of absurd platitudes about mortgages or parking spaces or the words their children said wrong or the last series they’d watched on Netflix. All that time I was giving to others instead of staying at home reading or drawing or simply looking at the ceiling, half naked, observing the cracks. I couldn’t stand the idea of being forced to live that office pantomime in perpetuity just to pay for things like rent or food or a book or a weekend at the beach. I broke down every morning when the alarm beeped because life, lived this way, seemed like a badly written tragedy, boring and sterile, devoid of fun and, even worse, devoid of content, and so, on my way to work, I felt like grabbing strangers by the shoulders and asking them why they weren’t feeling like me. What was their secret, how did they manage to maintain their composure, why didn’t they cry every time their alarms beeped?”
― Beatriz Serrano, El descontento

“Now that I had a salary, I decided to stay a little longer. But because everyone was still traumatized after the 2008 crisis, I kept hearing how lucky I was to have a job, and I suppose we were all afraid to quit and pursue our dreams and, in my case, the advertising world seemed safer and more reliable than the hypothetical and increasingly distant world of art. I guess I made the wrong decision. Or maybe, between the possibility of being happier and buying more things, I chose to buy more things.”
― Beatriz Serrano, El descontento

“I’ve been doing the same thing for eight years, and I know it doesn’t help anyone. I know the world would be a better place if jobs like mine didn’t exist. I know I take advantage of people’s insecurities and their desire to thrive in a society where no one can improve. And I know this because even I, after an eight-hour day full of elevator conversations that drive me to low-stakes suicidal ideation (like stapling my hand to get out of a meeting that makes me understand the true meaning of the word “infinite,” or pouring boiling water from the office kettle onto myself so I can spend five to ten days at home with my feet up), still believe that the solution to all my problems will be a floral Zara dress made in Bangladesh that has followed me on every website I’ve visited today, and that, in all certainty, will be worn by millions of women on the street next season. I still believe that dress will turn me into a different woman, a happy, carefree, springtime version of myself. I know that when you buy something, what you’re paying for is the promise of a better life. I know I’m also taking advantage of and accepting money from mediocre clients who think the greatest act of creativity is your smell, of leaving an impression, of not being a gray, boring person who spends two hours of their life every day getting to and from work. I sell the possibility that today, yes, today, with the help of that floral perfume, something extraordinary will happen to you. I’m not selling the umpteenth vacuum cleaner that no one needs; I’m selling the idea of having a nice, clean house, of being able to take a photo of that cute little corner you decorated Pinterest-style, uploading it on Instagram, and getting a lot of likes. Then I pitch a creative idea that’s like all the other creative ideas, the ones that came before and the ones that will come afterward. The lipstick effect. The smell of memories. Your dream house. They buy my idea, they pay us, I get congratulated, and we start all over again.”
― Beatriz Serrano, El descontento

“When “real traumatic shit” like this happens in our lives, we begin to unconsciously feel as though we have problems that we’re incapable of ever solving. And this assumed inability to solve our problems causes us to feel miserable and helpless. But it also causes something else to happen. If we have problems that are unsolvable, our unconscious figures that we’re either uniquely special or uniquely defective in some way. That we’re somehow unlike everyone else and that the rules must be different for us.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“I have both some good news and some bad news for you: there is little that is unique or special about your problems. That’s why letting go is so liberating. There’s a kind of self-absorption that comes with fear based on an irrational certainty. When you assume that your plane is the one that’s going to crash, or that your project idea is the stupid one everyone is going to laugh at, or that you’re the one everyone is going to choose to mock or ignore, you’re implicitly telling yourself, “I’m the exception; I’m unlike everybody else; I’m different and special.” This is narcissism, pure and simple. You feel as though your problems deserve to be treated differently, that your problems have some unique math to them that doesn’t obey the laws of the physical universe. My recommendation: don’t be special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure. Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator. The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible. This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you’re uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented, or intimidatingly attractive, or especially victimized in ways other people could never imagine. This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you’re somehow owed something by this world. This means giving up the supply of emotional highs that you’ve been sustaining yourself on for years. Like a junkie giving up the needle, you’re going to go through withdrawal when you start giving these things up. But you’ll come out the other side so much better.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“The deeper the pain, the more helpless we feel against our problems, and the more entitlement we adopt to compensate for those problems. This entitlement plays out in one of two ways: I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment. I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“You only realise in hindsight that your breakdown was a breakthrough.”
― Emma Gannon, A Year of Nothing: The inspiring Observer Book Club pick