elizabeth-wurtzel

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

I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible...

When she walks in that first Monday, of course I am awake - I am always up these days - I decide to lay it down. __ook_, I say, __ snort Ritalin. That__ what I do. I snort it all day long. I crush up the pills and inhale them like cocaine. I__ up to about forty a day. I can__ stop. I am planning to get help, to check into rehab or something like that, as soon as this book is finished. In the meantime, I can__ stop, and I am not going to._ She looks at me impassively. __ don__ care what you think about it. So you have a choice. I can sit here and do it in front of you, or I can keep running into the bathroom so you don__ have to see. Either way, it__ going to happen, so it__ just about how bad it__ going to make you feel to watch.__he doesn__ seem to know what to say. She stares. I think she is going to cry. I think she wants to give me a hug, maybe, but there is an invisible cage, a delicate netting of glass, an ice sculpture surrounding me that no one can walk through. I__ cold. I__e frozen into someone who just can__ be touched. I dare you to try.