Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines

It was like, if I looked long enough, maybe I’d finally be handsome. It never worked. I just got uglier and uglier. Nothing about me ever seemed good enough. And there was this sadness inside me—this hopelessness.

I pull the car out of there quick, feeling more guilty and humiliated than anything else.

she wrote something about seeing me and how I looked sad. She said it made her stomach feel all “fluddery.”

Reading it, I know just how she felt. My stomach feels fluddery.

There is something chilling and erotic about the whole thing.

I don’t know what to say about that.

But I was so scared of coming off the drugs. It was like this horrible vicious cycle. The more I used, the more I did things I was ashamed of,

I was wasting away in front of him.

Besides, I was too young to really be an addict. I was just experimenting, right?

But I still had this feeling like it could never happen to me. I had a 4.0 in high school, for Christ’s sake. I was a published writer.

They gave me the manual to life that Johnny had described. I could not, NOT give that up.