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To: elizabeth wurtzel, if you even read these, i dont blame you if you dont. I just got finished reading prozac nation and after being deeply moved by "more, now, again", i feel even more into what you have to say about the dark and deep world of depression. I am 17 years old and have never sought after professional help for what I now know is clinical depression. Your own personal experiences have helped me emensly with my own case. I would love to hear from you and possibly bounce some ideas off of you if you are interested. If not I understand completely (I can see how many people write to you). My hat goes off to you for your courageous writings on your personal dealing with depresion, not many people can even admit depression to themselves never mind the literary puclic. If you happen to browse over this I hope you will e'mail me at www.pete_bauer69@hotmail.com Thank you for your time
--P.B
04/09

Oooops: eyesproject@yahoo.com
--CTT
10/06

Elizabeth, I feel the same way about Change of Heart (another annoyingly stupid show I find myself watching). I find your writing to be quite validating to the human experience. I am, of course also talking about Prozac Nation which I read nearly six or so years ago. It was almost as affirming as reading Steinbeck’s, Catcher In The Rye for the first time (one of the things that saved me some fifteen years ago in high school). Being the self-absorbed, narcissistic adolescent that I was at the time, I thought nobody else ever thought the way that I did. I totally related to the Holden Caulfield character. I was totally blown away when I read that he too wanted to just fade away and live in a cabin up in the woods away from society (I thought: "Hey! That was MY idea man!!!"). I still find myself drifting in and out of that stream of consciousness (especially watching the reality based crap that’s on TV right now). I often think to myself, is this the downfall of modern civilization as we know it? And then I think to myself, no, it’s just another profit focused committee spoon-feeding bad taste. Anyway, I keep an underlined copy Steinbeck’s novel with me handy wherever I go (just to remind me where I came from). Anyway, now that I have your attention, I just wanted to thank you for validating my existence, if not for a little while anyway. I am a lot like you with my struggles with madness. I am so tired of having to apologize about the glumness of my e-mails, or having to save face for my faults as a human being. The darkness I feel comes out a lot of the time in my writing. I have kind of a cynical, sarcastic kind of humor which has gotten me through a good deal of my life and has saved me from killing myself numerous time. Despite any shortcomings you can attach to us as a race, us human being can be a pretty resilient people. I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm a ‘negative’ person. I guess I'm just honest. I like to tell it as it is. And being the honest person that I am, let me begin by explaining myself. In short, I think the same thing about astrology as I do about Ouija boards, God, Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny. I've never wanted to fit in (at least in contemporary society). I question not only authority but EVERYTHING. I don't like to take anything at face value. I like to answer to myself. I am very aware and in touch with my flaws and very open and not offended when they are pointed out to me. I feel that I can't grow if I'm blinded by my pride. I am selfish about my own personal space. When I feel like I'm not being true to myself, I can get very selfish. I'm also very compassionate though, and very giving. I am very sensitive, seek deep, meaningful relationships with others (I like to connect with humanity) and believe that the world IS simple, pure and generally find perfection in imperfection. I believe the way everything turns out is always perfection, even if it doesn't seem that way. I don't believe that there is some force out there with a grand plan in mind for us, but I do believe that experiences, even negative ones help shape us into a higher level of understanding if we remain mindful, and suspend emotional attachment (oh how Buddhist of me). I hang my life out on my fridge. Literally. My fridge is covered from the floor to the ceiling with various pictures of important people in my life, quotes, postcards, etc... I've always believed that you can tell a lot about a person by looking at what's on (or not on) their fridge. A friend recently wrote me concerned. She wrote: “I got the sense you're trying to tell me something or paint some picture for me, but I have to confess I'm not getting it...” This response has become predictable. It’s something that many people don’t know about me, which I can easily pass off as a sorta Gen X, mopey, it’s not cool to be happy kind of thing. But the truth is, I’ve been struggling with clinical depression since I can remember, which probably shouldn’t be TOO much of a surprise if people think really hard about it. It was mild in high school but only got much worse in college. It was a subtle form of madness though, taking even the most educated mental health professionals by surprise, so needless to say, it had a way of sneaking up on me before I’d even knew it had started. The unfortunate casualty of this enduring, internal struggle has been my school and job performances and my close relationships with other people. I can systematically follow the discernible pattern of highs and lows of my depressive cycles as presented in my college transcripts. I profoundly remember that as my graduation had drawn closer, it truly took every last bit of my energy to just finnish. Later, when the depression began to bleed into my work I’d start forgetting to perform crucial duties, like calling people back and making appointments. The major brunt of these episodes would only last a week or two, but the results were often devastating, far reaching and a long lasting mark against my personal integrity. By that time the major symptoms had abated, I’d already committed the damage, setting myself up for further disappointment. My wheels would start to turn and I’d be set further in motion feeling inadequate and worthless and the cycle would cascade out from nothingness. It was at that point that I would just want to sink away where no one could see me. Marketing was not what had taught me not to like myself, as Douglas Coupland so poignantly theorizes in his book Generation X. People would give me shit saying that I was too entrenched in a self loathing culture, surrounding myself with negative things and choosing occupational slumming by taking jobs beneath my abilities. But I hadn’t bought the crap they were attempting to sell to me. The crap that I feed upon was the crap of my own. I knew I had been battling it since I was younger, and it had only gotten worse in college. My induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage began long before any mind twenties breakdown (even though there had been a few up to that point). The one thing I did agree with was that my lifestyle escape wasn’t working. I was looking for an out, and I didn’t know what that was besides medication management. I craved something that worked for me and I didn’t know what it was. Something so I didn’t feel so lost and alone. I have my continuing interest in Buddhism and my sometimes selfendulgent rock & roll lifestyle to fall back on now, but when I first began college it was more difficult. I remember I used to carry these sleeping pills around with me, because sometimes my brain would just race a million miles an hour, and I'd have all these really fucked up thoughts and lie awake for hours trying to sort through it all. It drove me crazy and humbled me by making me feel very small. The sleeping pills would help me get to sleep, and gave me brief remission from the madness. Becoming narcissistically self-absorbed was only part of it though and I never expected anyone to understand that. I didn’t even understand it myself and I couldn’t even begin to explain it if I tried, and for that I felt even more isolated from humanity. It’s something subtly foreign to most people, something I’ve had to come to terms with throughout the course of my life, yet not something most people are able to acknowledge or even understand or like to talk about for that matter. It’s much easier to brush aside and ignore then to actually deal with. I’d walk into a room and the darkness followed would follow me and watch how it affected everyone in the room and I hated myself for it. A major aspect of my life that slowly began to change was that I hated leaving the house. This was due in part because I knew that I would just be highly irritable and filled with self hatred, but mostly because I lacked the energy to move. Not only was I filled with a hatred myself, but I developed hated everything around me. A dark poison had begun to run through my veins slowly turning everything numb and black and seemed as though everything that I touched somehow turned to shit. People would come up to me with superfluously innocent questions such as “What’s wrong?” or my favorite “Why don’t you just... (INSERT: be happy, get up , go out, find another job, find something to ‘be happy’ about, stop complaining, etc.). I’d joke about saying if I fixed all my problems then I’d have nothing left to complain about. In all honesty though, it was just my cleaver little colloquialism, developed out of a need of not wanting to be the target of the endless and inevitable: “Oh, you’re just being...” (INSERT: stupid, melodramatic, self-centered, a baby, trying to get attention, etc.). It was just another stupid something I tended to say which meant very much close to nothing. I’d find my thoughts would race day to day with constant feelings of self loathing, paranoia and emptiness, and I’d swear at times that I was going mad. I didn’t expect anybody to understand, and I didn’t expect anyone to have to put up with it (although, secretly I wanted them to). It would typically take me a while to ‘prepare myself’ before I went out, and sometimes I just couldn’t do it at all. Spontaneity was next to impossible. In a feeble attempt to cope I began filling my waking hour with irrelevant tasks such as song writing, watching Star Trek: Voyager (my savior the years following college), writing songs on my guitar or cutting up magazines and pasting them into an ever-evolving social commentary (a label I use which helps me feel as though I was doing something far more important that I really was). I’d get sucked up before I’d realize that hours had gone by and I hadn’t even left the house or even showered for that matter. At night I didn’t like to sleep because I didn’t like to be alone with my thoughts, alone in my bed, alone with the emptiness. I typically got to bed around 4am as my nightly flirt with insomnia found my counting the cracks in the ceiling. My arms and legs tended to feel extremely heavy and cumbersome at times. I was unable to lie on my back because my head would start to feel like it was physically sinking into the emptiness. Sometimes it helped to sleep on my couch, I don’t know why. I’d wake up around 2pm the next day feeling miserable, but at least it was light out. Taking naps was another form of distraction. Some naps would last 7 or 8 hours and would bleed into the night. I was able to sleep much better in the day, for some reason, I’m not quite sure why. Phone calls scared the hell out of me though. A fear crept into my veins chilling my blood as I sat motionless in bed, letting the answering machine pick up. I know you’re there, I know you’re there you bastard, they’d always say. It was almost like reality was knocking at my door and that was almost too much for me to handle. I would sometimes go days without talking to anyone. Inevitably the calls would stop coming. As one might guess, my relationships with others would suffer as well. I would show up late to friends houses, leave early, or at times, not even show up at all. I would believe at times that everybody in the room was filled with the same hatred that I had for myself. I would start picking myself apart, becoming overwhelmed and eventually had to leave to be alone with my thoughts. Mentally, I seemed to know it wasn’t true, but the physical response to my emotional state sometimes just became overwhelming. I never expected anyone to understand this. I created a reality to which I so greatly feared. What may have started as simple human insecurities eventually actualized and self-fullfilled. The worst part of it was that I felt as though nobody could understand me. I remember one night in particular I found myself calling my home phone from a party I was at, telling my answering machine that I was a ‘sonovabitch’. I don't really know why I did such terrible things to myself. I sometimes wondered to myself what could make me so cruel. Maybe the answer lied in self machoism. Maybe the plan was to listen to it upon arriving back at home, after several hours of severely drunk, self-indulgent complacency, that I just might find that last bit of warm inspiration to get me through night another sleepless night. I began to try and push myself to the limit, just to see how much I could tolerate. I wanted to see how strong I really was. Some sick and maniacal little plan of my inner mind, that side that likes to feel the pain. I was falling deeper into the sickened corners of my mind. I managed to get some twisted pleasure out of all this, like I was trying to tell myself that it's so much worse then it really is, so that I can be prepared for when I wake up and realize that reality really isn't all that bad. I found that my old coping mechanisms were no longer working. Sometimes I did things that were completely against who I claimed to be as a person, or at least who I was aspiring to be. Sometimes I did things I was not proud of. Sometimes I’d contradict myself and would become unpredictable. I would sometimes hurt the people who cared the most about me. A lot of the time I felt intense shame and guilt when I looked back and was reminded of my actions. To use a metaphor from Star Trek, I felt much like a Borg drone who had been thoughtlessly assimilating innocent races until the day came that his link was severed from the collective (for me this occurred after several weeks on a multitude of medications). In retrospect, the drone feels guilty for some of the things it had done in the past while joined to the collective. People don’t know if they can trust this person because, one day ‘the collective’ may come looking for them. My collective, which was often my greatest handicap, was the darkness of my own mind. It was the reason I could not be trusted or taken seriously -- two attributes of humanity that I held dearly in people and wished upon myself. It was this unpredictability of my nature that kept me from forming meaningful relationships with others. People saw one side of me and come to their own conclusions about me, given this subjective information. This was human nature and logical, and I tried not to harbor any ill thoughts about it. Most people I’ve found are actually willing to go above and beyond and would give me the benefit of the doubt. These people are now my deepest friends. I believe most of my friends know that I do honestly care about them, but sometimes I had a hard time showing it. I believe this is the reason I still have some friends. Depression typically runs deep in the bloodline. I don’t remember exactly how many people I’ve told this to (it’s so much a part of my life that I sometimes erroneously assume everybody knows) but my father killed himself when I was four years old, leaving my mother, brother and myself to live with my aunt. He placed a simple garden hose to the tail exhaust of his car and turn on the engine without ever saying goodbye. Nobody saw this coming either. My mother didn't speak to anyone for a year after that, so she wasn't really what you'd call 'available' too much. You can't really blame her for that though. All and all it really fucked her up. Not really having a father figure around in my life as a kid, maybe that's why I don't really like sports. I don't know... It's not a big thing though. Don't think I'm some kind of psychotic lunatic or something. Having a chemical imbalance is kind of like having diabetes or being lactose intolerant or something. You're chemicals are slightly askew. So what. I don't know, you asked. It’s like in the Catcher in the Rye where Caulfield asks this prostitute to come up into his room, thinking that it would make him feel better. Her name was 'Sunshine' but ironically enough, she only wound up making him feel 'blue as hell'. When he told her that she didn't have to have sex with him, that he 'just wanted somebody to talk to her', she had her pimp beat him up. Anyway, I just thought I’d send an e-mail your way, because, although you’re probably sick of the subject, you like to talk about feeling like crap. I don't choose to have many friends, and in fact, I don't really like that many people I come in contact with on a daily basis (to be completely honest). The reason that I'm telling you all of this, dispute years of social obscurity and transcontinental migrations, I've somehow come to genuinely want to share my thoughts with people who are willing to listen, like you and respect the friendship that might arise from it (even though it’s only cyber friendship). Tonight Makes Love To All Your Kind, - Chris PS - If you ever had the inclination to write, feel free to email me at . I'd love to chat sometime with you.
--CTT
10/06

By the way - email for JL is jenllawrence@hotmail.com (I'm way low-tech still)
--JL
09/05

Any email address for Elizabeth Wurtzel. She is one of the most raw writers I have read and an inspiration to this 29 year old manic depressive investment banker who is, at heart, a film critic. I have just written an essay on feminism and mental illness and if Elizabeth is going to the Toronto Film Festival to see Prozac Nation (Mick Jagger will be there too), I'd love to meet her.
--JL
09/05

hello ms. wurtzel. i'm not sure you'll ever read this, but i would very much like to get in contact with you. i'd like to talk to you about some things. you can reach me at virginityn@hotmail.com thank you.
--VL
08/03

Elizabeth, Have you read the The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler? If so how old were you when you read it? --richardwong79@hotmail.com
--RW
08/02

great review,Elizabeth, I just have to say I can't wait to read more of your work.
--e.d.
05/09

Fabulous review Elizabeth. How are you doing these days? I love your work =D - lickthepavement@bust.com
--CMB
04/09

Elizabeth, I have been a major fan of your work and writing style. You have literally changed my life. Anyhow, I love keeping up with your reviews and it makes my day brighter to read them :) Do you have a PO Box or something where us neurotic fans can send you a letter or something. Wow, that sounds creepy eh? Anyhow, just wanted to know info on if you were going to be touring for Radical Sanity. Thanks Jessika jessgibs@indiana.edu
--JG
03/27

There must be a love or a job for everyone because this is the worst, tv-guide, drivel.
--MS
03/02

I'd really like to see some swingers turned loose on the island. They would both fuck as many people as they could, and then happily embrace each other at the end of the show... much to the chagrin of all the sickos who were hoping to see the fur fly.
--JP
01/21

I didn't think this article was well-written. Wurtzel skips from point to point and never really comes to any sort of coherent conclusion. It's a shame, too, because "Temptation Island" and reality television in general is an interesting topic - just not in Wurtzel's hands.
--EVA
01/19

Used to think from a precursory skim and my own personal repulsion to the whole idea of a book called "Bitch" (how passe, how gross) that Wurtzel was another tripey pop-psychoanalyzer that needed to die, die, die, but this was OK despite/because of the usual generalizations. My question is, do we really need to ponder the significance of voyeurism? Or our very Godlessness? (pointlessness.. classlessness.. statuslessness...etc.) Why does this chick get paid to state the obvious: yay, a show that invades privacy. Well, duh--art has always been about lies and exploitation. Big fun! Can these intellectual vultures back off? Do they really think they have something to say about such a huge and basic force? It's like commenting on the vulgar masses, while trying to be humble enough to be accepted by them. Watch the show or do not, but let's not philosophize for fuck's sake. The plot is certainly less melodramatic than Shakespeare.
--a
01/19

Before I step up onto my mini-soapbox here, let me start by saying that, in all fairness, I did not watch the first episode of Temptation Island. Nor do I intend to watch any future episodes, on the off chance that some Fox Network lackey might be walking past my window, see that silly tripe on my television, and think, "Hey! If *this* John Q. Public slob likes this, we can keep this up for *years!*" The thing that bugs me most about this show isn't the "reality TV" part of it. I do happen to think the reality TV genre is uniformly uninteresting and panders to some lowest common denominator, but that doesn't in and of itself offend me on a deeper level. What *does* offend me on a deeper level is the fact that in this show, a situation that "could rip two people apart" is supposed to be entertaining. Two people getting ripped apart, in my mind, is a very sad thing. This show seems to suggest on some level that if two people are meant to be together, the relationship is unassailable and is a self-sustaining entity, requiring little work or effort on the individual's part. Hah! My generation seems to have forgotten what my grandparents knew so well... that making a relationship work sometimes requires real effort, but the effort is worth it. Is it possible to sabotage a relationship? Well, it seems to me that if you can work to make a relationship successful, you can also work to make it fail. A step in that direction might well be a two-week sabbatical on Temptation Island. Even though I think all the participants on the show made a bad decision, I hope they all end up together. I'd do anything if the show could end with no broken hearts. But then, that wouldn't be very good television, would it?
--JPF
01/19

One thing I found heartening......when the guys decided to send away the beautiful girl with the bad personality. Not that there is any thing wrong with being pretty...but it showed that all the talk of appearence being supreme is bravado. Ultimately even to the testoserone 4 personality prevailed. I think it's interesting that men love to act as if beauty is the supreme criterion in a reationship. It's as if superficiality is a virtue. That's why I loved seeing the guys admit for themselves....pretty is as pretty does.
--sg
01/19

Temptation island is for idiots and pathetic people with nothing better to do with their lives.
--dw
01/18

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