Read Online Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel - Free Book Online Page B

wallowing in a depression that might have been even more bottomless and intractable than the one I was experiencing. I have no way of knowing what might have happened had she viewed the situation differently. I’ll never know. She was the kind of mother who believed in pulling a Band-Aid off fast, getting over the pain in a snap; but she seemed resigned to let this depression drag on for years, to let this particular bandage come off slowly. Of course, she would never see it that way: She wanted the pain to be over really quickly in this case too, but she seemed to think that ignoring it would make it go away (Band-Aids sometimes do fall off by themselves). So mostly I remember having this nagging, gnawing feeling that I wished she would just let me be as bad as I was. I wished she’d let me sink way down low in front of her, let slide the need to maintain appearances just long enough for me to bottom out and get the kind of help Dr. Isaac was never going to give me. It was as if my therapy sessions with the doctor were one big buffer zone, a dopey palliative that would keep me afloat but would never really allow me to land in the depth of my despair. And I was starting to want to know the worst, I wanted to know how bad it could get.
    But she wanted to keep things as good as they could be. We’d always been a team, we’d always been so close, I’d always been her date for the kinds of occasions other women brought their husbands to, I’d always been her best friend—and it seemed that by cracking up I was letting her down. Failing her. I always felt a sense of responsibility toward her—I often felt like the oldest son of a recently widowed woman who is incapable of, say, programming her VCR by herself—and it made me feel extremely restricted in the range of negative emotions I was able to express. I could skip school, I could get lousy grades, I could hide in the girls’ locker room for hours, but I could never completely drop out, I could never lose my mind to the point where they’d have to send me away to a loony bin or some place for juvenile defectives because
my mother would not he able to survive such a personal debacle.
She barely wanted to know about the extent of the despair I was able to experience. You should be telling this stuff to Dr. Isaac, she’d say every time I tried to talk to her about my depression. It’s not that she was insensitive—sometimes she actually would try to talk to me about why I was like I was—but she just couldn’t stand it when I’d explain that nothing at all was wrong, that it was just a matter of everything. She’d want me to be specific: Is this because your father and I don’t get along? She’d want me to toss her some solution-oriented problem. She seemed to think I was like a quadratic equation, but the lack of a clear, discernible task to work with made her too crazy.
    One night, very late, she walked into my bedroom to find me lying face down on my shag carpet with a set of big, bulbous earphones on, listening to a live bootleg of a Bruce Springsteen tune called “The Promise,” and bawling because everything about the desolation of the song seemed so terribly true (the last line was something like, “We’re gonna take it all, and throw it all away”). She started screaming at me, telling me she couldn’t stand any more of this craziness, demanding that I explain to her right now what exactly was wrong.
What what what?
I just sat there, crying, blank, nothing to say, and she kept demanding that I tell her something, and I think in frustration I might have just said, Oh, Ma, you’re looking at all the trees, and I’m not even in the forest. And then she went to her room, smoked a cigarette, watched the eleven o’clock news, fell asleep with the blue light of the television still on, feeling completely helpless.
    After a while, it was always like this: I’d be