Elizabeth Wurtzel - Prozac Nation (1994)

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Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
I don't think it matters how many parents you've got, as long as those who are around make their presence a good one.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn't seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were normal, day after day wearing down everybody who gets near me. My behavior seems, somehow, not acute enough for them to know what to do with me, though I'm just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
I wasn't just the madwoman in the attic—I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
I always carry lots of stuff with me wherever I roam, always weighted down with books, with cassettes, with pens and paper, just in case I get the urge to sit down somewhere, and oh, I don't know, read something or write my masterpiece.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking

Elizabeth Wurtzel
That's what it's like in my head all the time, constant snow, constant weather patterns of all sorts - blizzards, cyclones.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
And then there are my friends, and they have their own lives. While they like to talk everything through, to analyze and hypothesize, what I really need, what I'm really looking for, is not something I can articulate. It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Just as our parents quieted us when we were noisy by putting us in front of the television set, maybe we're now learning to quiet our own adult noise with Prozac.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
And she keeps saying, how can you do this to me? And i want to scream, what do you mean, how can I do this to you? Aren't we confusing our pronouns here? The question, really, is How could I do this to myself?

Elizabeth Wurtzel
I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
It seemed like this was one big Prozac nation, one big mess of malaise. Perhaps the next time half a million people gather for a protest march on the White House green it will not be for abortion rights or gay liberation, but because we're all so bummed out.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
I wanted so much to forget the past, but it wouldn't go away, it hung around like an open wound that refused to scar over, an open window that no amount of muscle could shut.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
But then I never had to worry about a crash landing because I never even took off.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Occasionally I wished I could walk through a picture window and have the sharp, broken shards slash me to ribbons so I would finally look like I felt.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
It is so hard to learn to put sadness in perspective so hard to understand that it is a feeling that comes in degrees, it can be a candle burning gently and harmlessly in your home, or it can be a full-fledged forest fire that destroy almost everything and is controlled by almost nothing. It can also be so much in-between

Elizabeth Wurtzel
The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death. When I look ahead, all I can see is my final demise. And they say, But maybe not for seventy or eighty years. And I say, Maybe you, but me, I'm already gone.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
I wonder if any of them can tell from just looking at me that all I am is the sum total of my pain, a raw woundedness so extreme that it might be terminal. It might be terminal velocity, the speed of the sound of a girl falling down to a place from where she can't be retrieved. What if I am stuck down here for good?

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Homesickness is just a state of mind for me. i'm always missing someone or someplace or something, i'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. my life has been one long longing.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Rock bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable...Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It's a failure of vision, a failure to see the world as it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not some other way.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
If you take someone's thoughts and feelings away, bit by bit, consistantly, they then have nothing left except some gritty, gnawing, shitty little instinct, down there, somewhere, worming around in the gut, but so far down, so hidden, it's impossible to find.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
All I want to talk about is the oncoming apocalypse in my brain.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
The voices in my head, which I used to think were just passing through, seem to have taken up residence.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
And it seemed hard to believe that these people who were so close to me couldn't see how desperate I was, or if they could they didn't care enough to do anything about it, or if they cared enough to do anything about it they didn't believe there was anything they could do, not knowing—or not wanting to know—that their belief might have been the thing that made the difference.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Why does the rest of the world put up with the hypocrisy, the need to put a happy face on sorrow, the need to keep on keeping on?... I don't know the answer, I know only that I can't.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Oh, Ma, you're looking at all the trees, and I'm not even in the forest.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Pick a man, any man. Every guy I fall for becomes Jesus Christ within the first twenty-four hours of our relationship. I know that this happens, I see it happening, I even feel myself, sometimes, standing at some temporal crossroads, some distinct moment at which I can walk away and keep it from happening, but I never do. I grab at everything, I end up with nothing, and then I feel bereft. I mourn for the loss of something I never even had.

Elizabeth Wurtzel