Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America

I’m the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background.

They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am.

The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death.

How could I let anybody see me this way? How could I expose other people to my person, to this bane to the world? I was one big mistake.

I felt something very wrong going on. In fact, I felt that I was wrong—my hair was wrong, my face was wrong, my personality was wrong—my God, my choice of flavors at the Haagen-Dazs shop after school was wrong!

My friends, and my mother for that matter, would be relieved to find that I was more the me they wanted me to be.

I would fantasize about going back to the person I had always been.

But then I never had to worry about a crash landing because I never even took off.

How did all that life-force energy turn so completely into a death wish?

It is hard for me to remember a life that was so cocksure, so free of self-doubt, so pure in its certainty.