Elizabeth Wurtzel - Prozac Nation (1994)

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I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. 'Madness' is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
If only my whole life could be words and music, if only everything else could slip away.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Divorce has taught us how to sleep with friends, sleep with enemies, and then act like it's all perfectly normal in the morning.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
No one who had never been depressed like me could imagine that the pain could get so bad that death became a star to hitch up to, a fantasy of peace someday which seemed better than any life with all this noise in my head.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
I start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn't one I'll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it's worth it.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
I was so scared to give up depression, fearing that somehow the worst part of me was actually all of me.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
One of the terrible fallacies of contemporary psychotherapy is that if people would just say how they felt, a lot of problems could be solved.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
My God, I could raise a family of six children and hold down a full-time job with all the energy I expend on depression!

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Years of depression have robbed me of that—well, that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Depression is all about if you loved me you would. As in, if you loved me you would stop doing your schoolwork, stop going out drinking with your friends on a Saturday night, stop accepting starring roles in theater productions, and stop doing everything besides sitting here by my side and passing me Kleenex and aspirin while I lie and creak and cry and drown myself and you in my misery.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
There is a classic moment in 'The Sun Also Rises' when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, Gradually and then suddenly. When someone asks how I lost my mind, that's all I can say too.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
I start to feel like I can't maintain the facade any longer, that I may just start to show through. And I wish I knew what was wrong. Maybe something about how stupid my whole life is.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
At heart, I have always been a coper, I've mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I've always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdown. But in the end, I'd be able to get up and on with it, could always do what little must be done to scratch by.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Getting help for substance abuse can be reduced to the deceptively simple focus of 'keeping away from the dope.' But what does getting help with depression mean? Learning to keep away from your own mind?

Elizabeth Wurtzel
And what I thought, every time I thought about my father, every time his name came up, was quite simply: I WANT TO KILL YOU. I wanted to be more mature, more reasonable, I wanted to have a big, fat, forgiving heart that could contain all this rage and still find room for kind, beneficent love, but I didn't have it in me. I just didn't.

Elizabeth Wurtzel