Free Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel

lying helpless in my room, she’d be lying helpless in hers, there was nothing we could do to make each other feel better, and the whole apartment seemed stuck in some miserable detente.
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    Does that make any sense? Is it possible that I didn’t collapse, become incapacitated, a nonfunctioning mental case of the catatonic kind, because
my mother wouldn’t let me?
I mean, when people just flat out fall apart, when they get into the kind of state where they think they’re talking to angels and they sleep barefoot in the park in the middle of winter, it’s not as if they
got permission
to be that way. They are that way because they can’t help it. Had I been far enough gone, I’d have gone there too. Right?
    Maybe. Maybe not. The measure of our mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job. If you’re still at the point when you’re even just barely going through the motions—showing up at work, paying the bills—you are still okay or okay enough. A desire not to acknowledge depression in ourselves or those close to us—better known these days as
denial,
is such a strong urge that plenty of people prefer to think that until you are actually flying out of a window, you don’t have a problem. But this does not take into account the socioeconomic factors, the existence of guilt, of a disciplined moral conscience, or in my case, an understanding of my mother’s precarious, delicate nature—which placed definite limits on how much rope I had to hang myself. My mother and I had switched roles so often—I helped her pick out boyfriends after the divorce, soaked her cigarettes in water so that she couldn’t smoke, or told her, as she sat bawling in the kitchen because she had just lost a job and was scared we’d be broke, that I was sure everything would be all right—and I was afraid to abandon the parental responsibility I felt for her. I knew the limits of the people who were close to me, and in my worst downs, I was ever more attuned to them. Depression gave me extreme perspicacity; rather than skin, it was as if I had only thin gauze bandages to shield me from everything I saw.
    My depression did not occur in a vacuum, nor did it eradicate my urge and desire to get better if there was an earthly way to do so. As my mind seemed to slow-drip out of control, I was still able to contain some of the loss, to make use of the geeky A-student discipline I had cultivated over the years. I kept it all within the realm of something happening to a girl who still manages to wear designer jeans, who is still interested in applying purple mascara and turquoise eyeliner before leaving the house in the morning. I made myself presentably pretty each day just in case the man of my dreams happened to be waiting on the sidewalk outside of Manhattan Day School, all set to carry me away from the geography of my depression, kind of the way Sam Shepard carries off Jessica Lange at the beginning of the movie
Frances,
or the way he remains in love with her thirty years later, after she’s had a full frontal lobotomy.
    And so, at age twelve, with more and more frequency, I’d find myself sitting inside McDonald’s early in the morning eating my Egg McMuffin, my attention fixed on some of the hard luck cases sitting nearby in the orange and red seats, muttering to themselves, wearing clothes that were filthy, smelling from sleeping on the sidewalks and drinking too much Colt 45, and I contemplated the difference and the distance between them and me. How far to go before I, or anyone like me, fell into such a derelict, dehumanized place? Did you have to survive Vietnam (so many of the panhandlers on the subways seemed to be veterans) or did it take poverty, chemical dependency, severe mental illness, and long years in state institutions for this to