R137 It’s never enough. That’s human nature. Let’s go back to the 1500s, when Shakespeare gave us this in Richard II:

“Thus play I in one person many people,

And none contented. Sometimes am I king;

Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,

And so I am. Then crushing penury

Persuades me I was better when a king;

Then am I king’d again, and by and by

Think that I am unking’d by Bolingbrook,

And straight am nothing. But what e’er I be,

Nor I, nor any man that but man is,

With nothing shall be pleas’d, till he be eas’d

With being nothing.”

It’s part of the human condition. If you’re the king, then the responsibilities and the risk of losing is overwhelming and all you want is to be poor and anonymous with no troubles. Then if you get that wish, you realize how much having nothing sucks and you want to be king again—and then you get it and can’t live with it. And wherever you are, goes the rest of the monologue I didn’t include here, you are harassed by “people” in your world, who are really your own thoughts, which are urgent, grandiose, lofty, self-important, and mostly die their own sad little deaths because they don’t have a leg to stand on.

Joan was the king of beauty. Bette was the queen of talent. Neither had it all. And both of them always felt slighted by the world. (As we all do.)