Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel

they finally say that they’re getting to like him, when they ask to borrow tapes or make requests to hear
Born to Run,
I just start yelling that they’re all a bunch of unoriginal copycats and Bruce belongs to me alone. I make them swear that if they ever meet anyone new and claim to like any Springsteen songs, they’ll remember to footnote me. And they all throw up their hands and say, Look, we’re trying. So Paris comes and sits down beside me and I make her a little nervous when I tell her that she’s got to listen to this song called “For You.” She’s afraid I’ll be cross if she doesn’t like it or—even worse—that I’ll be really furious if she does. I explain that the song is about a girl just like me who kills herself. We listen to the first verse to the cryptic lines about a girl’s fading presence about “barroom eyes shine vacancy,” about someone whose grip on life is so vague that to see her you have to look hard.
    That’s me, I say to Paris. 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. 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 looks so very vibrant and shimmery, but who is in fact soon going to be gone. When you look at that 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, getting covered over more thickly with darkness, coats and coats of darkness that are going to suffocate me in the sweltering heat of the summer sun that I can’t even see anymore, even though I can feel it burn.
    Imagine, I suggest to Paris, only knowing that the sun is shining because you feel the ache of its awful heat and not because you know the joy of its light. Imagine being always in the dark.
    I am going on and on this way to Paris, who is still uneasy, and is not quite sure what to say. You know, I continue, I’d be just like the girl in the song except for one thing. One thing. And that’s that he says she’s all he ever wanted. He loves her so much. The whole song is about how he’s come to take her to the hospital, to rescue her from suicide.
    I start, as if on cue, to cry. I am so caught up in the idea that nobody would actually try to save me if I were to slit my wrists or hang myself from one of the rafters in the bunk. I can’t believe anyone might care enough to try to keep me alive. And then I realize that, yes, of course they would, but only because it is the thing to do. It’s not about true caring. It’s about not wanting to live with the guilt, the insult, the ugly knowledge that a suicide took place and you did nothing. Once I make a suicidal gesture, then everyone indeed will come running because my problems leave the realm of the difficult, workaday, let’s-talk-it-through stuff and I become an actual medical emergency. I will qualify as a trauma case that Aetna or MetLife, or whichever insurance carrier I’ve got, will actually cover. They’ll pump my stomach, stitch my wrists, apply cold packs to the bruises on my neck, do whatever it is they have to do to keep me alive—and then the heavy-duty, institutional-size mental health professionals take over.
    But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn’t seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were normal, day after day wearing down everybody who gets near me. My behavior seems, somehow, not acute enough for them