Elizabeth Wurtzel

Experience," which is just a euphemism for heartache and heartbreak, failed love and false promises, for every time you told yourself This is the real thing and Finally I've found my way home only to end up lost in a muck or lying across rickety train tracks, praying for deliverance and not knowing if that would mean getting run over or being spared; "experience," which is a neutral word that most people know only means something good on a resume, a term that in the rest of life is more like a criminal rap sheet full of mishaps that cannot be expunged, this indelible quality made more frightening because there are no authorities keeping track, no one is forcing you to remember these things, it is all your own fault, it is only you who cannot forget; "experience," which is supposed to be the playground and peep show and life-size labyrinth of adolescence, which can, when it occurs at the right time in life...if it is delivered in moderate and judicious measure...make you a more capable lover and friend, spouse and partner.

In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. Dr. Sterling was right about that. I loved it because I thought it was all I had. I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony.

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.

I know by now, only too well, that you can never get away from yourself because you never go away.

How can you hide from what never goes away?

If I were another person, I go on, I wouldn__ want to deal with me, I don__ want to deal with me, It__ so hopeless, I want out of this life. I really do. I keep thinking that if I could just get a grip of myself, I could be all right again. I keep thinking I__ driving myself crazy, but I swear, I swear to God, I have no control. It__ so awful, It__ like some demons have taken over my mind. And nobody believes me, Everybody thinks I could be better if I wanted to. But I can__ be the old Lizzy anymore, I can__ be myself anymore, I mean, actually, I am being myself right now and it__ horrible.

But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn__ 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__ just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.

They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am.

When things get unbearable, I wrap myself into a tight ball and shut my eyes. Every muscle in my body is tense. I open my eyes and I'm still where I was when I closed them to escape. Nothing's changed.

Woke up this morning afraid I was gonna live.

The brief relief of seeing other people when I leave my room turns into a desperate need to be alone, and then being alone turns into a terrible fear that I will have no friends, I will be alone in this world and in my life. I will eventually be so crazy from this black wave, which seems to be taking over my head with increasing frequency, that one day I will just kill myself, not for any great, thoughtful existential reasons, but because I need immediate relief.

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.

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.

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.

I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong.

Sometimes it feels like we're all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression.

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

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.