"In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. Dr.Sterling was right about that. I loved it because I thought it was all I had. I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I of had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony. Taking a hypersensitive approach to life had come to seem so much more than pure and honest than joining the ranks of the numb masses who could let it all slide by. What I'd stopped realizing was that if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all. Everything registers at the same decibel so that the death of a roach crawling across a Formica counter can seem as tragic as the death of your own father. The people on the outside - and that's the right word, because to a depressive everyone else is outside - who are selectively expending their emotional energy are actually a lot more honest than anyone who is depressed and has replaced all nuance with a constant, persistent droning despair." - Elizabeth Wurtzel.