Sometimes the reason you hate things is because they remind you of things you’ve denied to yourself.

“The trouble was, I thought this alternative persona I had adopted was just that: a put-on, a way of getting attention, a way of being different. And maybe when I first started walking around talking about plastic and death, maybe then it was an experiment. But after a while, the alternative me really just was me.

Those days that I tried to be the little girl I was supposed to be drained me. I went home at night and cried for hours because so many people in my life expecting me to be a certain way was too much pressure, as if I’d been held against a wall and interrogated for hours, asked questions I couldn’t quite answer any longer.

I remember being in a panic one day at school when I realized that I could not even fake being the old Lizzy anymore. I had, indeed, metamorphosed into this nihilistic, unhappy girl. Just like Gregor Samsa waking up to find he’d become a six foot long roach, only in my case, I had invented the monster and now it was overtaking me. This was what I’d come to. This was what I’d be for the rest of my life. Things were bad now and would get worse later. They would.

I had not heard the word depression yet, and would not for some time after that, but I felt something very wrong going on

—  Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

For the record, when I read this book in 1994, I remember really, REALLY hating it.  Maybe I hated it because it was too true, or trendy, or that it was trendy to be a young girl and depressed, and/or get a book deal with trendy title like that, but… as is the case with all of the books or memoirs I’ve ever read about psychological conditions — years later, I realize I always hated them, because they reminded me too much of what was going on with myself.