I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.
Embrace fanaticism. Harness joie de vivre by pursuing insane interests, consuming passions, and constant sources of gratification that do not depend on the approval of others
Because, frankly, I have a tough time feeling that feminism has done a damn bit of good if I can’t be the way I am and have the world accommodate it on some level.
That’s the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end.
That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.
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.
I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out.
If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking
Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent
In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead
…occasionally I wished I could walk through a picture window and have the sharp, broken shards slash me to ribbons so I would finally look like I felt.
I start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn’t one I’ll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it’s worth it.
Sometimes it feels like we’re all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression.
Everything’s plastic, we’re all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.
In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead.
I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong.
One of the terrible fallacies of contemporary psychotherapy is that if people would just say how they felt, a lot of problems could be solved.
It’s nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it’s around me somewhere, but I just can’t feel it.
And she keeps saying, how can you do this to me? And i want to scream, what do you mean, how can I do this to you? Aren’t we confusing our pronouns here? The question, really, is How could I do this to myself?
When things get unbearable, I wrap myself into a tight ball and shut my eyes. Every muscle in my body is tense. I open my eyes and I’m still where I was when I closed them to escape. Nothing’s changed.
They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am.
I know by now, only too well, that you can never get away from yourself because you never go away.
As someone very sagely said during the parricide trials of the Menendez Brothers: anytime your kids kill you, you are at least partly to blame.
I don’t think it matters how many parents you’ve got, as long as those who are around make their presence a good one.
I don’t think it matters how many parents you’ve got, so long as the ones who are around make their presence in a long way.
Good and bad are not opposites, they are both just different forms of intensity.
In life, single women are the most vulnerable adults. In movies, they are given imaginary power.
It was just very interesting to me that certain types of women inspire people’s imagination, and all of them were very difficult women.
My imagination, my ability to understand the way love and people grow over time, how passion can surprise and renew, utterly failed me.
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.
Age is a terrible avenger. The lessons of life give you so much to work with, but by the time you’ve got all this great wisdom, you don’t get to be young anymore.