Prozac Nation Is My Comfort Book
The Bible of depressed girls everywhere.
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Reading was my coping mechanism in high school. Many of those books were memoirs or nonfiction psychology books. I was on a mission to figure myself out, and I loved to read. I would reserve books through my local library, where I spent hours of my life searching the online portal and finding new books.
One of those was called “Prozac Nation” by Elizabeth Wurtzel.
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I was intrigued because it was a memoir by a young woman who suffered from depression. Hey, that’s me! I thought.
I became obsessed with that book. I related to so much of what the author wrote about. She perfectly captured my nihilism, my sadness, my desperation. I checked and re-checked out that book for as long as the library’s computer system would let me. Eventually, I had to return it. I immediately logged back on to reserve the next available copy. (I did eventually buy my own copy, don’t worry).
Basically, the book is the author’s life story. She talks about her childhood a bit, but mostly focuses on her adolescence and college years. It was both interesting because her life was much different than mine (she grew up in NYC and went to Harvard, whereas I….. lived in a small town in the midwest) and her emotional experiences were still so relatable to me.
The book has received criticism for being too self-involved, too dramatic, too much. Clearly, those types of reviews were written by people who’ve never suffered from extreme depression. Who haven’t sat and stared at the wall for hours because it was too hard to get out of bed. Who haven’t experienced the pain of ongoing depression. And let’s not forget, people don’t like when a woman tells her truth.
While writing this article I searched online for memorable quotes from the book. I copied and pasted…… many of them. Let’s see if I can narrow it down to my favorites. It will be difficult.
(my thoughts are under each of the quotes)
“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.”
Seasonal depression always had a hold on me, each winter. But there was always an end in sight: spring. This summer after my sophomore year, I became depressed in June. That had nothing to do with lack of sunlight. Suddenly, there was no concrete end in sight. No cozy blankets and snowstorms to give me an excuse to stay inside in my bed. Just the whirring of the air conditioner at my summer job, where I cleaned motel rooms and forgot how to be a person.
“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.”
I dreamt about being able to give up. Of letting go. Of getting rid of the facade that I could function. But I just kept on going. I never missed school or work. Every day I just got up and dragged myself through the motions. I wasn’t thriving by any means, but I was there. Minimally participating, trying to get through the next 4 minutes without breaking down. And then the next 4 minutes. And the next.
“I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out.”
I always thought there was something wrong with me, deep in my core. I knew that depression is probably caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. But the pain was so deep, so all-consuming that I still thought there must be a problem with ME, the person.
“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.”
There was no such thing as rest for me. I slept as much as I could and I was still tired, because it was my mind that truly needed the rest, not my body. I needed a rest from my mind, from my brain, from my thoughts. No matter what I did, I was always there.
“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.”
I couldn’t make sense of how everyone else in my life was just… continuing. Didn’t they see how exhausting life is? Couldn’t they see that there was no point in completing math homework or picking a career or washing your hair? Couldn’t my parents see that adulthood was clearly a pain-filled endless void, why did they want me to do it too? I was exhausted and I was expected to continue on as if nothing was wrong. Anyone who has never been extremely depressed will never be able to understand how exhausting life is. They say depression causes “fatigue”, which is a laughable word to use for the dark sludge that takes over your body and mind.
“That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.”
I made dark art about my sadness. I channeled it into writing in my journal or for English papers, I made collages and zines and paintings in art class. I could pass it off as “art” or “homework” but in reality, I did it to keep myself going. I needed to express my pain or I would have taken it out on myself, on my body. I needed my pain to be useful for something, I needed it to leave my body somehow.
I think back on the papers I wrote and the art I made and I think — why didn’t any of my teachers catch on? Why weren’t they worried? They should have been alarmed, disgusted, appalled. They should have immediately called my parents.
“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. The actual dying part, the withering away of my physical body, was a mere formality. My spirit, my emotional being, whatever you want to call all that inner turmoil that has nothing to do with physical existence, were long gone, dead and gone, and only a mass of the most fucking god-awful excruciating pain like a pair of boiling hot tongs clamped tight around my spine and pressing on all my nerves was left in its wake.”
The author perfectly describes how it feels to be so existentially gone and yet still in excruciating pain. The line about the hot tongs clamped around her spine… those words speak to me.
“…if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all.”
I was obsessed with the concept of nothing. I was convinced that part of my pain was actually because I felt nothing. I used to doodle the word nothing on my notebooks, I even got the word tattooed on my wrist when I was 18. “This nothing is everything” I’d muse to myself late at night when I couldn’t sleep, or during school when I was debating whether or not to go cry in the bathroom. The feeling of emptiness, of painful nothing, was everywhere. It was all there was.
In actuality, I was feeling EVERYTHING. I was feeling the weight of the world as if I was in charge of it. I was feeling the weight of existence.
And finally, a collection of quotes that speak for themselves:
“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.”
“And I know, knew for sure, with an absolute certainty, that this is rock bottom, this what the worst possible thing feels like. It is not some grand, wretched emotional breakdown. It is, in fact, so very mundane:…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 feeling that the only thing that matters in all of life is the one bad moment…Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It’s a failure of vision, a failure to see the world how 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 — and not some other way.”
“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…depression is pure dullness, tedium straight up. Depression is, especially these days, an overused term to be sure, but never one associated with anything wild, anything about dancing all night with a lampshade on your head and then going home and killing yourself…The word madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting-out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony…Remember that when you’re at the point at which you’re doing something as desperate and violent as sticking your head in an oven, it is only because the life that preceded this act felt even worse. Think about living in depression from moment to moment, and know it is not worth any of the great art that comes as its by-product.”
“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.”
“I could not bear the deep freeze settling around my bones at the thought that yet another attempt to get out of my life alive would end in disappointment. Time became palpable and viscous. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached.”
“…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.”
“I want to explain how exhausted I am. Even in my dreams. How I wake up tired. How I’m being drowned by some kind of black wave.”
“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?”
“Sometimes, I get so consumed by depression that it is hard to believe that the whole world doesn’t stop and suffer with me.”
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