Quotes by Elizabeth Wurtzel

If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking

At heart, I have always been a coper, Ive mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and Ive 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, Id be able to get up and on with it, could always do what little must be done to scratch by.

Some catastrophic moments invite clarity, explode in split moments: You smash your hand through a windowpane and then there is blood and shattered glass stained with red all over the place; you fall out a window and break some bones and scrape some skin. Stitches and casts and bandages and antiseptic solve and salve the wounds. But depression is not a sudden disaster. It is more like a cancer: At first its tumorous mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then one day -- wham! -- there is a huge, deadly seven-pound lump lodged in your brain or your stomach or your shoulder blade, and this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you. Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you wont even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning twelve or turning fifteen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.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.Thats the thing I want to make clear about depression: Its got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal -- unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on natures part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead.And the scariest part is that if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, hell never know. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, Gradually and then suddenly. When someone asks how I love my mind, that is all I can say too

Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent

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

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

...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 start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isnt one Ill have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if its worth it.

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

In those pamphlets that they give at mental health centers where they list the ten or so symptoms that would indicate a clinical depression, suicide threats or even simple talk of suicide is considered cause for concern. I guess the point is that whats just talk one day may become a real activity the next. So perhaps after years of walking around with these germinal feelings, these raw thoughts, these scattered moments of saying I wish I were dead, eventually I too, sooner or later, would succumb to the death urge. In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead.

Everythings plastic, were all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.

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.

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.

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

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.

Its nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know its around me somewhere, but I just cant feel it.

And she keeps saying, how can you do this to me? And i want to scream, what do you mean, how can I do this to you? Arent we confusing our pronouns here? The question, really, is How could I do this to myself?

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.

Woke up this morning afraid I was gonna live.