It all seems pointless in light of the fact that we’re all going to die eventually. Why do anything - why wash my hair, why read Moby Dick, why fall in love, why sit through six hours of Nicholas Nickleby, why spend time getting into the right schools, why dance to the music when all of us are just slouching toward the same inevitable conclusion? The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death.
+ life + death + short + meaningless + existential + pointless + die + time + conclusion + prozac nation + depression + elizabeth wurtzel + point of life
I wonder if any of them can tell from just looking at me that all I am is the sum of my total 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 + prozac nation + depression + wounded + broken + pain + eating disorder + recover + terminal + falling + saved + stuck + forever + fear + darkness + raw
I mean, if you were to find a shattered mirror, find all the pieces, all the shards and all the tiny chips, and have whatever skill and patience it took to put all that broken glass back together so that it was complete once again, the restored mirror would still be spiderwebbed with cracks, it would still be a useless glued version of its former self, which could only show fragmented reflections of anyone looking into it. Some things are beyond repair. And that was me.
+ Elizabeth Wurtzel + prozac nation + mirror + shattered + broken + depression + useless + fragmented + cracks + beyond repair + eating disorder
…homesickness is just a state of mind for me, I’m always missing someone or some place or something, I’m always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. My life has been one long longing.
+ Elizabeth Wurtzel + prozac nation + longing + empty + yearning + missing + homesick + mind + life + home
I was scared of the way I felt as I ran away, knowing that if I stopped, I might have to confront the reason why I was always running — and I’d have to admit that there was no reason. Run, run, run. Was it toward something or away from something else?
+ Elizabeth Wurtzel + prozac nation + running + scared + fear + confront + feelings + run + admit
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 + Prozac Nation + open wound + heal + depression + past + scar
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 + Prozac Nation + depression + rock bottom + extreme + unbearable + unfocused + failure
The atypically depressed are more likely to be the walking wounded, people like me who are quite functional, whose lives proceed almost as usual, except that their depressed all the time, almost constantly embroiled in thoughts of suicide even as they go through their paces. Atypical depression is not just a mild malaise…but one that is quite severe and yet still somehow allows an appearance of normalcy because it becomes, over time, a part of life. The trouble is that as the years pass, if untreated, atypical depression gets worse and worse, and its sufferers are likely to commit suicide out of sheer frustration with living a life that is simultaneously productive and clouded by constant despair. It is the cognitive dissonance that is deadly. Because atypical depression doesn’t have a peak- or, more accurately, a nadir, like normal depression, because it follows no logical curve but instead accumulates over time, it an drive its victim to dismal despair so suddenly that one might not have bothered to attend to treatment until the patient has already, and seemingly very abruptly, committed suicide.
+ Elizabeth Wurtzel + Prozac Nation + suicide + depression + atypical depression + despair + frustration + treatment + suffer
Very early in my life it was already too late.
+ Elizabeth Wurtzel + Prozac Nation + depression + too late + childhood
That’s the problem with reality, that’s the fallacy of therapy: It assumes that you will have a series of revelations, or even just one little one, and that these various truths will come to you and will change your life completely. It assumes that insight alone is a transformative force. But the truth is, it doesn’t work that way. In real life, every day you might come to some new conclusion about yourself and about the reasoning behind your behavior, and you can tell yourself that this knowledge will make all the difference. But in all likelihood, you’re going to keep on doing the same old things. You’ll still be the same person. You’ll still cling to your destructive, debilitating habits because you emotional tie to them is so strong that the stupid things you are really the only things you’ve got that keep you centered and connected. They are the only things about you that you you.
+ Elizabeth Wurtzel + Prozac Nation + therapy + fallacy + revelation + destructive + cling + change + tranformation
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. I don’t want any more vicissitudes, I don’t want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it. I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already exhausted.
+ Elizabeth Wurtzel + prozac nation + depression + hypocrisy + happy + sorrow + vicissitudes + exhausted + twenty + try + tired + done
No one will ever understand the potency of my memories, which are so solid and vivid that I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me they are driving me crazy. My subconscious has not buried them, my superego has not restrained them. They are front and center, they are going on right now.
+ Elizabeth Wurtzel + Prozac Nation + depression + memories + flashbacks + vivid
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 + Prozac Nation + cure + depression + battle + forever + fight + life + worthwhile
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.
+ Elizabeth Wurtzel + Prozac Nation + depression + end + insiduous + impossible + never-ending + survive
