From More, Now, and Again:
“All I can remember is good-byes. Sometimes someone will be standing in front of me, “I would love to be in a place where everything is going bad and my insides match the outsides.” "I’m cold. I’ve frozen into someone who just can’t be touched. I dare you try." "Sleep is dreamy and erotic all by itself. I luxuriate in it like a new love." “The opportunity to be merciful is one of the beautiful rights that we have, the possibility From Prozac Nation:
and I already feel him walking away.”
that we can be better than the worst things that happen to us, that we can take the horror
and use it as a way to become nobler—why should we pass up this chance?
I’ve been waiting
for a break from holding it together for so long that sometimes I fall apart.”
"I wonder if any of them can tell from just looking at me that all I am is the sum total of my pain, "I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away "The trouble was, I thought this alternative persona I had adopted was just that: a put-on, "Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it." "Inside here it is sterile, it is drab, the light is artificial and too bright, but at least no one can touch me." "Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead. "That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees "You don't even have to hate to have a perfectly miserable time." "I froze before the keyboard. I couldn't think of a damn thing to say. No poems, no prose, no words. "I start to feel like I can’t maintain the facade any longer, that I may just start to show through.
a raw woundedness so extreme that it might be terminal. It might be terminal velocity,
the speed of the sound of a girl falling down to a place from where she can't be retrieved.
What if I am stuck down here for good?"
and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat,
someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve,
the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind
as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace
or some picnic in the park,the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again,
I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union.
Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible..."
a way of getting attention, a way of being different. And maybe when I first started walking around
talking about plastic and death, maybe then it was an experiment. But after a while, the alternative me
really just was me. Those days that I tried to be the little girl I was supposed to be drained me.
I went home at night and cried for hours because so many people in my life
expecting me to be a certain way was too much pressure,
as if I'd been held against a wall and interrogated for hours,
asked questions I couldn't quite answer any longer.
Sometimes I wish that there were a way to let people know that just because I live in a world
without rules, and in a life that is lawless, doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt so bad the morning after.
Sometimes I think that I was forced to withdraw into depression because it was the only rightful protest
I could throw in the face of a world that said it was alright for people to come and go as they please,
that there were simply no real obligations left."
the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible
to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key."
The pain cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up
to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself
into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify it or push it outside or find its beauty within."
And I wish I knew what was wrong. Maybe something about how stupid my whole life is.
I don’t know. Why does the rest of the world put up with the hypocrisy, the need
to put a happy face on sorrow,the need to keep on keeping on?...
I don’t know the answer, I know only that I can’t. I don't want any more vicissitudes,
I don't want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it.
I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already exhausted."
