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Getting help for substance abuse can be reduced to the deceptively simple focus of ‘keeping away from the dope.’ But what does getting help with depression mean? Learning to keep away from your own mind?

Elizabeth Wurtzel

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Elizabeth Wurtzel
Age: 52 †
Born: 1967
Born: July 31
Died: 2020
Died: January 7
Autobiographer
Journalist
Lawyer
Writer
New York City
New York
Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel
Mind
Getting
Dope
Help
Reduced
Simple
Depression
Helping
Substance
Away
Keeping
Keep
Abuse
Doe
Learning
Mean
Focus
Deceptively

More quotes by Elizabeth Wurtzel

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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. The fog is like a cage without a key.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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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. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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Sometimes it feels like we're all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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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?
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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That's what it's like in my head all the time, constant snow, constant weather patterns of all sorts - blizzards, cyclones.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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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.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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I'll see Naomi Wolf on television periodically, I have nothing against her and what she says, but I'll feel that she's a politician, like she's got an agenda to get across and that she doesn't always say what's really true or exactly what she feels.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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There is a classic moment in ‘The Sun Also Rises’ when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, “Gradually and then suddenly.” When someone asks how I lost my mind, that’s all I can say too.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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I come from a family of screamers. If they are trying to express any emotion or idea beyond pass the salt, it comes in shrieks.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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I am fortunate to have been well paid for an almost pathological honesty.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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...if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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And I want out of this life on drugs.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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Its the people you are close to, the ones who love you, the ones who have seen your heart, who have touched your soul - to them, it is obvious that something is wrong or missing. Your heart and soul are missing. They feel it. It hurts them. It kills them.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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I start to feel like I can't maintain the facade any longer, that I may just start to show through. And I wish I knew what was wrong. Maybe something about how stupid my whole life is.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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Taking a hypersensitive approach to life had come to seem so much more pure and honest then joining the ranks of the numb masses who could let it all slide by. What I stopped realizing was that if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all. Everything registers at the same decibel.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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My imagination, my ability to understand the way love and people grow over time, how passion can surprise and renew, utterly failed me.
Elizabeth Wurtzel