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.

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 can see that I imagine all kinds of rejection that never happens. I can see that I beg and plead for love that is freely offered because I somehow believe that if I don't ask for it, everyone will forget about me: I will be a little kid sent off to sleep-away camp whose parents forget to meet her at the bus when she comes back in August. Or else I think people are nice to me only to be nice to me, that they feel sorry for me because I am such a loser- as if anyone could possibly be that generous.

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.

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

That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.

Taking a hypersensitive approach to life had come to seem so much more pure and honest then joining the ranks of the numb masses who could let it all slide by. What I stopped realizing was that if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all. Everything registers at the same decibel.