Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel

Author:Elizabeth Wurtzel
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

8

Space, Time, and Motion

She is the rain,

waits in it for you,

finds blood spotting her legs

from the long ride.

DIANE WAKOSKI

“Uneasy Rider”

The next semester was going to be great. A recovery period. I would treat Cambridge like a metropolitan mental health retreat, a full course load of Comp Lit, café au lait, and therapy. No boyfriends, no drinking, no drugs, nothing to distract me, pleasantly or otherwise, from my single-minded, stubborn goal of sanity. I would have no life until I knew how to actually live one. Sure, now and again there’d be parties, and of course there would be friends and gossip—friends and gossip are a good thing—but no entanglements. No obsessive-compulsive relationships that are so absorbing that when you’re in the middle of one you can’t even get through the fashion spreads in Vogue, can’t even read seven thousand words about Demi Moore in Vanity Fair, certainly can’t achieve the kind of pellucid concentration it would take to really get into therapy, to work a program to make the sturdy rugged steps it would take to lick this depression thing once and for all.

The first thing that needed to be done, once I blew into town and settled into my apartment on Kirkland Street, was to find a decent therapist. Mom would foot the bill because she was totally petrified. She thought nothing less than a medical doctor, preferably one from a top school, like, say, Harvard, would do the trick because she thought I was completely nuts. But my roommate Samantha’s father, one of the first lay analysts to be accepted by some important Freudian society in Europe, recommended that I see this psychiatric social worker he had trained. I decided I’d visit all of them, every name that was ever mentioned, whether by Dr. Saltenstahl at U.H.S. or by any of the screwed-up friends I had I had consultations with so many practitioners that after a while my days were just a long series of door plaques and an alphabet soup mix of titles—Ed.D., M.S.W., Ph.D., A.C.S.W., M.D.—and it struck me as an odd irony that a person as ill equipped as I was to make decisions about almost any important aspect of my life now had to decide who would help correct that condition.

I ultimately chose a psychiatrist who Dr. Saltenstahl recommended to me, a woman who at one time worked at Harvard and now had a private practice in her beautiful colonial home on Mt. Auburn Street. Her name was Diana Sterling, and I liked her because she’d gone to Harvard like me back in the early seventies, was now married to a classmate of hers, and had two kids with the civilized-but-still-trendy names Emma and Matthew who attended a Cambridge private school full of professors’ children and Daughters of the American Revolution gone hippie. It seemed to me that she lived an honorable, stable life that made sense to me, unlike so many therapists I’d met who seem to have chosen their profession mainly as a way to exorcise their own demons.

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