It doesn’t matter how many years go by, how much therapy I embark on, how much I try to achieve that elusive thing known as perspective, which is supposed to put all past wrongs into their rightful and diminished place, that happy place where all the talk is of lessons learned and inner peace. No one will ever understand the potency of my memories, which are so solid and vivid that I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me they are driving me crazy. My subconscious has not buried them, my superego has not restrained them. They are front and center, they are going on right now.
Elizabeth WurtzelFeminism is a good venue for getting yourself across as much as for getting your point across.
Elizabeth WurtzelMy God, I could raise a family of six children and hold down a full-time job with all the energy I expend on depression!
Elizabeth Wurtzelif only my whole life could be words and music, if only everything else could slip away.
Elizabeth WurtzelWhenever 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.
Elizabeth WurtzelAs 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 WurtzelThat's the thing I want to make clear about depression: It's 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 nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space.
Elizabeth Wurtzel