Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel Read Free Book Online Page B

first grade was still learning how to add and subtract. My inner resources were so thorough and complete that I often had no idea what to do with other children. They all seemed so juvenile to me, especially compared to my mom or to my babysitters like Nelsa and Kristina and Cynthia, who were already in high school and wore bell-bottom jeans with painted-on flower appliques on the pockets and thighs.
    You see, until the very moment when I first broke down at age eleven, I was a golden girl in spite of everything. True, my parents were a little out of it and at each other’s throats all the time, but I had more than compensated for that by being adorable and charming in the way of precocious little girls, by doing so well in school, by being stubborn and domineering, by being so fucking persistent.
    While we didn’t keep a kosher home, I somehow managed to win the school Brochos Bee, the Jewish equivalent of a spelling bee, five years in a row. Instead of spelling words, I had to know what blessings to say on different foods. I retired from this rather odd competition after winning the national contest, against boys with earlocks and girls who wore long sleeves and thick tights in June. For my Bible courses, I would rack up extra-credit points by learning various Hebrew passages by heart and reciting them in class. It always amazed teachers that no one at home could speak or read Hebrew, that I seemed to be tutoring myself (eventually, my mom felt left out and took lessons); the educators seemed unable to comprehend the overwhelming sense of invinceableness I possessed. No one could ever have imagined that as a child I was completely convinced that I could do anything on earth I wanted to By the time I was in seventh grade they set up a separate class for me my friend Dinah and a Russian immigrant named Viola so that we could learn subjects with our own special teacher at our own pace.
    And it wasn’t just in academic achievements. I taught myself to play tennis by banging a ball up against the wall downstairs from our building for hours every day. Our neighborhood was racially mixed without actually being integrated, and the playground on top of the Food City in front of our building was filled with white children and their moms during the day, while a posse of black teenagers took over the place at night. During that dusky hour when the area began to change its identity, I befriended a teenage boy named Paul with whom I regularly played some version of squash. The fact that he was so much stronger really helped my game. But when my mom found out about Paul—who was, she noticed, a
black teenager
and therefore probably on drugs—she somehow dug up the money to pay for tennis lessons at school. There were no more afternoons on the streets after that. It wasn’t until I was sent away to summer camp and first confronted the Jappy girls from Long Island, who had hours of private lessons and country club memberships and courts in their back yards, that I began to doubt that I could grow up to be Chris Evert.
    It is hard for me to remember a life that was so cocksure, so free of self-doubt, so pure in its certainty. How did all that life-force energy turn so completely into a death wish? How quickly it seemed that my well-developed superego managed to dissolve into buckets of free-flowing, messy id.
    You see, until I really cracked up, at ten or eleven or twelve or whenever it was, you most certainly would have described me as, well, as
full of promise.
That term is loaded with irony to me now because I know how false that appearance of promise is. I know how much latent discontent and sorrow that visible determination can mask, but still I am sure that at one time there was a ruddiness in my cheeks, a beaming excitedness in my eyes that suggested so much possibility. I was an astronaut who was going to fly so high, so far beyond the moon, so far beyond the whole wide world.
    But then I never had to worry