Okay so enough about me..now what do you think about me?
Just as our parents quieted us when we were noisy by putting us in front of the television set, maybe we're now learning to quiet our own adult noise with Prozac.
Whenever I talk to anyone I care about, I am always seeking approval. There is always a pleading lilt in my voice that demands love. Even the people I work with, the ones I am supposed to have a professional relationship with, all business, get pulled into my need. I can't help it. I want to be adored.
I am motivated to write because it is what I am meant to do. It is not a choice - it is what I am. I did not choose writing - it chose me. And I believe it is necessarily that way. Anyone doing this for some other reason should not be.
I have had the same friends since college, although as time has gone on, the daily nature of those relationships has changed, such that it is not daily at all.
How can you hide from what never goes away?
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.
I made 'Prozac Nation' necessary reading because I write necessarily. I tell my story because it is about everyone else: in 1993, people took pills to relieve the pain just like they do now, but it scared them; it doesn't any more, because talk is not cheap at all - it is tender.
Judaism will be enmeshed in pride and shame for as long as it endures. But to endure as a country, Israel must shun both these tendencies.
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?
The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death. When I look ahead, all I can see is my final demise. And they say, But maybe not for seventy or eighty years. And I say, Maybe you, but me, I'm already gone.
I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.
Convention serves a purpose: It gives life meaning, and without it, one is in a constant existential crisis. If you don't have the imposition of family to remind you of what is at stake, something else will.
I was meant to date the captain of the football team, I was going to be on a romantic excursion every Saturday night, I was destined to be collecting corsages from every boy in town before prom, accepting such floral offerings like competing sacrifices to a Delphic goddess.
I was completely wrapped up in a person who didn't know me at all, like a claustrophobe who chose to live in a small dark cave, trying to whip the fear.
I am fortunate to have been well paid for an almost pathological honesty.
As someone very sagely said during the parricide trials of the Menendez Brothers: anytime your kids kill you, you are at least partly to blame.
Lying in bed for a few days wouldn't help enact the kind of personality overhaul it would take to pull me away from my well-established pattern of mapping out escape routes, clinging to them like vines, and then watching as these lifeless forces suddenly pushed me away, though I continued to hold on for dear life.
But he does insist on a conversation. Goddamn it! Why can't people just do what I want them to do and be gone? It's a worldwide conspiracy to make me be polite when I don't want to be.
Everything's plastic, we're all gonna die.
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 its compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.
If you already know what your response will be before you've heard what the other person has said, you are not listening.
I'll see Naomi Wolf on television periodically, I have nothing against her and what she says, but I'll feel that she's a politician, like she's got an agenda to get across and that she doesn't always say what's really true or exactly what she feels.
Doing nothing is opting for the sweetness of stillness...Instead of fighting with that which you cannot control, you might as well just see it through...
Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead.
The measure of mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job.
It is so hard to learn to put sadness in perspective so hard to understand that it is a feeling that comes in degrees, it can be a candle burning gently and harmlessly in your home, or it can be a full-fledged forest fire that destroy almost everything and is controlled by almost nothing. It can also be so much in-between.
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.
I had tried so hard for so many years to turn all my despair into sexual abandon, I wanted so much to stop being me and start being someone else's toy, but I didn't have it in me.
Affection as medicine is highly overrated...a person who is as sick with depression as I most certainly was cannot possibly be rescued through the power of anyone's love.
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.
And then, if I die anytime soon, at least they'll be able to say that I led a productive life and did all my work on time. I may be dead, but I'll be up to date in Space, Time, and Motion.
The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death.
You don't even have to hate to have a perfectly miserable time.
There are some remarks that are so stupid that to be even vaguely aware of them is the intellectual equivalent of living next door to Chernobyl.
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.
If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking.
I've got to go home. Even if such place doesn't really exist.
I've calmed down. Looking back, I was engaged more in dramas than I was in relationships. I've spent a lot of my life being in it for the plot, and I don't do that anymore. I'm satisfied. I'm not competing with myself. I accomplished things I wanted to do, so everything I do now is because I want to, not because I'm trying to prove something.
If you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all.
Ritalin abuse is a big issue in the US.
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.
No one who had never been depressed like me could imagine that the pain would 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.
I admire Bruce Springsteen because he's a heroic person who has lots of integrity and has this incredible body of work that is so vital.
Oh, Ma, you're looking at all the trees, and I'm not even in the forest.
In order for therapy to be effective, a patient must be prodded and provoked, forced into confrontations, given sufficient incentive to push herself out of the caged fog of depression.
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'm a huge Springsteen fan, and yet if either he or Bob Dylan had to be erased from the world's hard drive, I would save Bob Dylan's work for sure - he's the greater talent, and by leaps and bounds and skyscrapers and rocket blasts. But Bob Dylan is an alien to his public.
