I wanted so much to forget the past, but it wouldn't go away, it hung around like an open wound that refused to scar over, an open window that no amount of muscle could shut.

Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.

It seemed like this was one big Prozac nation, one big mess of malaise. Perhaps the next time half a million people gather for a protest march on the White House green it will not be for abortion rights or gay liberation, but because we're all so bummed out.

I 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.

Into every sunny life a little rain must fall.

Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst.

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.