Tweak - Nic Sheff

This is another memoir about a drug addict that I read in relation to my work. I thought reading it so soon after Broken might be too much for me to handle, but I actually thought the two books worked really well together. Sheff becomes a drug addict while he is in high school. He is the son of divorced parents in the entertainment industry who he never blames for his addiction, but who it seems lacked significant boundaries while raising him. Like Moyers, Sheff spirals out of control and bounces between recovery and relapse. Unlike Moyers, however, Sheff cannot hold down a job and he is forced to trade sex for drugs. This risky behavior exposes him not only to disease, but also to physical (and obviously emotional) abuse. Both Moyers and Sheff address the need to get to the heart of the reason why one uses drugs in the first place. For Moyers, it is largely due to his feelings of inadequacy and failure in light of his father's successes. For Sheff, it is a never-ending feeling that he is a disgusting and unworthy human-being. Sheff's expression of these feelings was very similar to Elyn Saks's discussion of her feelings in The Center Cannot Hold. So, I was not suprised to find out during the course of the book that Sheff had been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. Sheff's mental illness played out interestingly in his quest to get clean. He had a devoted AA sponsor who wants the best for him, but eschews all drugs, even the antipsychotics that would help Sheff deal with his disorder. And so Sheff began to hide the drug use, and his relationship with that sponsor fell apart. The ability to use drugs to treat a mental illness, without spiraling back into the use of illegal drugs (or abuse of prescription drugs) is an interesting aspect that I would have liked to read more about. Ultimately, Sheff ends up in rehab, and his understanding of addiction to drugs, as well as his co-dependency in relationships was similar to Moyer. But, it was his work around his trauma - trauma from childhood and from his time as a sex worker (which in and of itself stemmed from his childhood trauma and mental illness) really helped me to see how one can begin to combat the results of addiction. Sheff's father has written a companion book entitled Beautiful Boy, which looks at Sheff's addiction through the eyes of a parent. I plan to read that one sometime soon. In the meantime, while reading these drug memoirs is quite taxing and certainly depressing, I think it is really helping me to better understand the nature of addiction and the difficult search for recovery.