Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel

about a crash landing because I never even took off.

2
Secret Life
It was like sawdust, the unhappiness: it infiltrated everything, everything was a problem, everything made her cry—school, homework, boyfriends, the future, the lack of future, the uncertainty of future, fear of future, fear in general—but it was so hard to say exactly what the problem was in the first place.
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MELANIE THERNSTROM
The Dead Girl
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    I go to Dr. Isaac’s office twice a week, which, I think, if I were a normal eleven-year-old kid I would hate and resent, but being me, I like it fine. He asks me a lot of questions about myself and my life, and being someone who just loves to talk, especially about my problems, I think it is mostly a lot of fun. I can’t imagine that we’re actually accomplishing anything in these sessions. I mean, I really do believe we might have gotten to the bottom of the root of the mess if such a place existed, but my misery is just too random. Dr. Isaac would occasionally make pronouncements that seemed sensible. He’d say, Because your parents divorced when you were so young and pursued such different lifestyles with such clashing value systems, you have a split foundation, you are a fragmented person. Or he’d say, You’re very precocious and very sensitive, and as a result you were extremely attuned to all the terrible things going on around you when you were little, so the damage is surfacing now. Everything he says seems perfectly plausible, but it’s all one big
so what?
as far as I’m concerned. I know all this stuff already. For me the problem is what to do about it.
    Dr. Isaac is the psychiatrist that the school psychologist recommended to my mother when I started to spend more time hanging out in her office than in the classroom. Or maybe she recommended him after the time Mrs. Edelman, the math teacher who doubled as the girls’ basketball coach, found me in the locker room one day wounding my legs with a pack of razor blades while my tape recorder played Patti Smith’s
Horses.
Without even bothering to ask what I was doing (though she did ask what I was listening to), Mrs. Edelman dragged me upstairs to the psychologist’s office—literally pulled me across the floor by my arm until we got to the elevator that was reserved for teachers only, which made me feel special—and deposited me inside her door, pointing at me as if to say,
Look at this,
as if she were an attorney and I were exhibit A, all the material evidence she needed to make her case. And the point was: This child needs professional help.
    I think in exchange for solemnly swearing I would never cut myself again, I got the psychologist, who was called Dr. Bender even though she had only a master’s degree, to promise she wouldn’t tell my mom about what was wrong with me. About the razors.
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    I guess the cutting began when I started to spend my lunch period hiding in the girls’ locker room, scared to death of everybody around me. I would bring my functional black and silver Panasonic, meant for voice recording and not music, and I would listen intently to the scratchy sound of the tapes I’d accumulated, mostly popular hard rock like Foreigner, which, trashy as it was, sounded like liberation to me. I’d sit there with my tape recorder, eating cottage cheese and pineapples from a stout thermos I brought from
home (I was, by this time, also certain that I was fat), and it was a peaceful relief from having to deal with other people, whether they were teachers or friends.
    Every so often, I would sit in the locker room on the floor, leaning against the concrete wall while my tape recorder sat on the bench, and I would fantasize about going back to the person I had always been. The reverse transformation couldn’t be that much of a leap. I could just try talking to people again. I could get the astonished look off my face, as if my eyes had just been exposed to