Wurtzel, Elizabeth. Prozac Nation. New York: Riverhead Books, 1994. 246.
And then Rafe came along, and he tried to love me, I really believe he did, but there was no amount of love that would have stitched my wounded psyche at that point. In fact, compared to all the other forces at work in the world, love is rather impotent and pitiful: My father must have told me a million times how much he loved me, but that emotion—assuming it was even real—hardly had the strength to counter the many other acts of wrong he committed against me. Contrary to romance novels and the love-conquers-all mentality that even those of us who grew up in an era of divorce are—in response to some atavistic instinct—still raised to believe, love is always a product and a victim of circumstances. It is fragile and small. As Leonard Cohen once wrote, “Love is not a victory march / It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.” I discovered, through the love Rafe gave me, that affection as medicine is highly overrated, that a person who is as sick with depression as I most certainly was cannot possibly be rescued through the power of anyone’s love. It is just so much worse than that.
* Reproduced for personal use without express permission.
