Read Online Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel - Free Book Online

gone.
    No one seems willing to ask what I mean by that, which is a good thing because I don’t know. It’s not that I’m fixing to die any time soon, but my spirit seems to have already retreated to the netherworld, and I figure, Hey, how much longer does my body have? People talk about the way disembodied spirits roam the world with no place to park themselves, but all I can think is that I am a dispirited body, and I’m sure there are plenty of other human mollusk shells roaming around, waiting for some soul to fill them up. At any rate, I don’t really explain what I mean when I talk about death, but I am keenly aware that I am frightening people more than a little bit, and I realize that this is the only small delight I get anymore: knowing that others worry, watching them get this sad, discouraged look on their face, like, Shit, bring in the professionals. I take pleasure in the pain I cause others: My life has become a tearjerker movie, and I am glad to be having the calculated effect.
    My mother cries when she sees my report card. Ellie, what’s happening to you? she asks. She cries some more.
My baby! What’s happened to my baby?
She calls Dr. Isaac and asks why he can’t make me better faster. She goes to see him, and pretty soon she’s so crazy from dealing with me that she’s a patient of his too.
    By now I have an entire secret life that my mother either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know about: Several days a month I wake up in the morning and get dressed to go to school, but instead I take my knapsack and head over to the local McDonald’s, drink tea and eat an Egg McMuffin for breakfast, wait until my mother has left for work at 9:00, and then I go back home and get into bed for the rest of the day. Sometimes I go to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and read old articles about Bruce Springsteen on microfilm. I am particularly proud that I’ve found the stories from the week of October 5, 1975, when Bruce had appeared on the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
simultaneously. But mostly I watch the ABC lineup of soap operas, from
All My Children
to
One Life to Live
to
General Hospital,
lying blissfully under the covers in my mother’s bed the whole time.
    Sometimes I lie in my own bed and listen to music for hours. Always Bruce Springsteen, which is weird, I have to admit, because I’m becoming this really urban punked-out kid, and he is kind of the spokesman of the rumpled, working-class suburbs. But I identify with him so completely that I start to wish I could be a boy in New Jersey. I try to convince my mother that we should move out there, that she should work in a factory or as a waitress in a roadside diner or as a secretary at a storefront insurance office. I want so badly to have my life circumstances match the oppressiveness I feel internally. It all starts to seem ridiculous: After all, Springsteen songs are about getting the hell
out
of the New Jersey grind, and here I am trying to convince my mom that we ought to get
into
it. I’m figuring, if I can just become poor white trash, if I can just get in touch with the blue collar blues, then there’ll be a reason why I feel this way. I will be a fucked-up Marxian worker person, alienated from the fruits of my labor. My misery will begin to make sense.
    That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.
    The idea that a girl in private school in Manhattan could have problems worth this kind of trouble seemed impossible to me. The concept of white, middle-class, educated despair just never occurred to me, and listening to rock and roll all day was probably no way to discover it. I didn’t know about Joni Mitchell or Djuna Barnes or Virginia Woolf or Frida Kahlo yet. I didn’t know there was a proud legacy of women who’d turned overwhelming depression into prodigious art. For me there was just Bruce—and the Clash, the Who, the Jam, the Sex Pistols, all