AbsurdBeats

Elizabeth Wurtzel is dead. Cancer.

I read Prozac Nation, of course—what fucked-up self-involved late-twenties white woman didn’t read it?—scarfing it down with enthusiastic horror, but begged off her after that.

She was too too too too too much. I couldn’t bear it; what if that was me?

That was the horror, of course: that I was too much.

(The enthusiasm? Oh, “fucked-up” and “self-involved” cover that.)

I was too much, at least when younger: too enthusiastic, too emotional, too attention-seeking, too serious, too much of whatever adjective can be wrapped around a bright and yearning girl who only wanted everything.

That was okay (for me; it must have been exhausting for others) when I was very young, but as self-awareness sidled in I began to question what I could want, what I should want, whether it was okay to want anything at all.

And, eventually, I concluded it was not. If I was not to want, then I was not to be so much, too much.

In retrospect, this was not the best decision, but fitting, nonetheless: from too much to too little.

Wurtzel apparently found a way to keep going amidst her own storms by celebrating them: “I hate anodyne. I hate that word. … I am baroque. I am rococo. I am an onomatopoeia of explaining away.”

Sitting in my small life I can finally appreciate her largeness, admire her willingness to embrace the messiness of her life, and wonder at her refusal to renounce herself.

If she was too much, then so be it.