01c. 1993 ADEverything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
02c. 1993 ADAnd 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.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
03c. 1993 ADIn 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.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
05c. 1993 ADI 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.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
06c. 1993 ADOne of the terrible fallacies of contemporary psychotherapy is that if people would just say how they felt, a lot of problems could be solved.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
07c. 1993 ADIt'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.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
08c. 1993 ADAnd 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? Aren't we confusing our pronouns here? The question, really, is How could I do this to myself?Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
09c. 1993 ADThe 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.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
11c. 1993 ADI 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.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
12c. 1993 ADWhen 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.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
14c. 1993 ADIf I were another person, I go on, I wouldn’t want to deal with me, I don’t want to deal with me, It’s 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’m driving myself crazy, but I swear, I swear to God, I have no control. It’s so awful, It’s 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’t be the old Lizzy anymore, I can’t be myself anymore, I mean, actually, I am being myself right now and it’s horrible.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
15c. 1993 ADBut day after day of depression, the kind that doesn’t 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’m just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
16c. 1993 ADI know by now, only too well, that you can never get away from yourself because you never go away.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
18c. 1993 ADMadness 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.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
19c. 1993 ADExperience," 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.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
20c. 1993 ADAs someone very sagely said during the parricide trials of the Menendez Brothers: anytime your kids kill you, you are at least partly to blame.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
22c. 1993 ADThere are all these things my mother is good for that my father isn't, and all these things my father is good for that my mother isn't, and if only they could work out their differences, or keep the dim of discord to a minimum, I could have two whole parents.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
23c. 1993 ADI don't think it matters how many parents you've got, as long as those who are around make their presence a good one.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
24c. 1993 ADI don't think it matters how many parents you've got, so long as the ones who are around make their presence in a long way.Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote ↗
