Clothes on the Internet

The world is frustrating, spirit destroying, really.

After a beatdown, I am expected to regrow my spiritedness by going on a walk, meditating, or eating kale. No. I won't do that. The world took the spiritedness away from me. Why is it my responsibility to spontaneously regenerate it?

Instead, I click on the app, a pinkish-purple, orange square inside of a square, and look at clothes and plastic and wait for my frustration to pass by looking at things more polished and beautiful than the ugliness of my defeat.

At first blush, the promises clothes make on the internet are so optimistic. "Your new fave!” “Eco-friendly!" "Soft!" Anything is possible on the internet if you aren't looking closely. And I can't look closely because I'm having a day. Instagram knows me and my day intimately enough to prompt me to act with just a single click. If I double click, I will fall into an existential rabbit hole as dark and doomy as the alleged pedophilia of Alice and Wonderland's Lewis Carroll.

When my clothes arrive frighteningly fast in the magical mail, they better fit. If they are too small, my body is wrong. If they are too big, I have ruined the planet by flying ill-fitted clothes back and forth through the sky shitting out carbon. Who do I think I am? Kim Kardashian with a private jet spewing evil and emissions across the planet?

I don't know who I am, that's why I bought the clothes in the first place. I bought the clothes for the promise of a lighter personality. A fresh start. A new reality free of frustration, free from the limits that appear at every turn.

Woman, take a breath. Let's oxygenate the layers of bleakness you suffocate us with. No. I won't do that. Internet culture is manipulating our psychology to behave the exact way I'm behaving. Still, in moments of peak frustration, it is my responsibility to fortify my boundaries, to protect myself from the foreboding insufficiency the internet made me feel in the first place.

You know who finds optimism here? Oprah, Tony Robbins, and Instagram Influencers. I think optimism is a delusion. But so is pessimism when you think about how miraculous it is that flowers exist and that a worm cut in half can keep living as two halves. There is a reason for the recommendation to walk, meditate, and eat kale. It is how we are reminded of flowers and wormy-halves. Nonetheless, this is work. This is responsibility, endless responsibility.

Hades makes Sisyphus, First King of Ephyra, roll a bigass boulder up a hill every day as a punishment for more than a few serious crimes. To this day, Sisyphus is still there, rolling the boulder up and up, day after day. Sisyphus should try meditating. But he's sick of trying. So he pauses, perches the boulder on his shoulder, and opens the app. He clicks: superficial relief with one day shipping. Then he rebalances the boulder between both hands and continues pushing.