Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel Page B

bushes to do it for me. I made a few more scratches, alternating between legs, this time moving the file more quickly, less cautiously.
    I did not, you see, want to kill myself. Not at that time, anyway. But I wanted to know that if need be, if the desperation got so terribly bad, I could inflict harm on my body. And I could. Knowing this gave me a sense of peace and power, so I started cutting up my legs all the time. Hiding the scars from my mother became a sport of its own. I collected razor blades, I bought a Swiss army knife, I became fascinated with the different kinds of sharp edges and the different cutting sensations they produced. I tried out different shapes—squares, triangles, pentagons, even an awkwardly carved heart, with a stab wound at its center, wanting to see if it hurt the way a real broken heart could hurt. I was amazed and pleased to find that it didn’t.
    Â 
    Enter Dr. Isaac.
    His office is on 40th Street and Second Avenue, a long ride on the M104 from school, so I often have to leave early. I consider this a huge advantage: I hate school. Sometimes I will schedule appointments with him in the middle of the day, telling my mom that there was no other time available, and then I leave school and don’t bother to come back. Dr. Isaac asks me about this: Aren’t you missing a lot of school lately, Elizabeth? Sometimes I lie to him and say it’s a day off, it’s some rabbi from the fifteenth century’s birthday or something like that, but after a while I figure—I mean he
is
my therapist—I might as well just tell him I’m cutting. Cutting school, that is.
    My truancy is starting to show. My grades fall below B’s. I used to practically flagellate myself for getting anything below an A—I mean, an A—was cause for alarm—and now I simply do not care at all. Teachers pull me aside to ask what’s wrong. They make themselves available, say things like, If you ever want to talk, I’m here for you. They tell me that they know I can do better than this. My Talmud teacher, Rabbi Gold, takes away the leather-bound copy of
Through the Looking Glass
which I read under my desk during class instead of trying to follow the convoluted rabbinical argument about exactly how big a drop of milk has to be to render an entire pot of meat nonkosher (one sixtieth of the whole is the conclusion, but some disputing parties say one sixty-ninth). After class, he tries to talk to me, though I fade into abstraction. I hear him muttering some words in his vaguely liturgical singsong voice—something like, When one of my most brilliant students can’t even tell me what sidrah we’re studying today, I know something is wrong—but I just don’t care I feel bad that I’ve insulted this nice man with my indifference to what he’s teaching but I don’t see what I can. do about it I don’t care that I don’t care but I do care maybe a little bit about not caring about not caring (if you can follow the convolutions)—but maybe I do feel sorry for all the nice people whose efforts are wasted on a waste case like me. All this just amounts to more grist for the mill of the ill: On top of feeling sad I also feel guilty.
    I explain the same thing to everybody: It all seems pointless in light of the fact that we’re all going to die eventually. Why do anything—why wash my hair, why read
Moby Dick,
why fall in love, why sit through six hours of
Nicholas Nickleby,
why care about American intervention in Central America, why spend time trying to get into the right schools, why dance to the music when all of us are just slouching toward the same inevitable conclusion? The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death. When I look ahead all I can see is my final demise. And they say, But maybe not for seventy or eighty years. And I say, Maybe you, but me I’m already