I was in eighth grade when I first got into Nirvana. I think you have to be—not that I don’t still enjoy listening to their music once in a while, I do. But when you’re thirteen years old and your spirit is fermenting with strange hormonal rage and you hate yourself so much and you wish no one in the world could see you and you wonder why everybody hates you so much and you wonder why no one in the world sees you, well, that’s when you need something like Nirvana to smooth you out. Like legions of middle schoolers before me, I fell hard for Kurt Cobain; and like all of them, I believed I was the first one to ever truly understand how he must have felt, because I felt it too. That ragged yowl? That sound played in my head every day, all the time.

For some kids, this is where it stops: wow, this song is catchy and angsty! Let me go apeshit for all of this guy’s records and then move on. I’d done exactly that with plenty of other bands. Some three-chord song would lodge in my head for a time, and I’d play it to absolute death, methodically sanding every layer of magic off the song until a few weeks later I was left with a smooth nub of something I used to love. Nirvana was different, though. I could play and play and play those songs and never hit that horrible wall, when I’d play it one time too many and find myself thinking about other things.

I played Nirvana at home. I played Nirvana on the bus. I played Nirvana for my parents in the car until they turned it off, pained. Undeterred, I put Nirvana on mix CDs and left those in the car. There would be no escape. Mine was a proselytizer’s love. Nirvana had saved me and I wanted everyone else I knew to accept the good word into their hearts. Saved me from what, though? I didn’t know. When you’re thirteen you get to say stuff like “Nirvana saved me” and your best friend knows just what you mean even if you don’t. One day I had been lonely in a changing body; the next day Kurt Cobain was in there with me, telling me in gutturally screamed, thematically opaque lyrics that, however lonely I felt, I wasn’t alone.

I knew he’d been a heroin addict, and I knew he’d killed himself. Both facts only added to his luster. Kids do love a tragic idol. I loved my tragic idol Kurt Cobain back when heroin was still the “Scary Drug,” the one that the culture single-mindedly warns you about at every turn. In the 80s, the Scary Drug was crack; then we launched into the opioid crisis and it became heroin; we were still a year or so away from the “Faces of Meth” campaign when I was knee-deep in Nirvana fandom. That my hero had succumbed to a “Scary Drug” made him… hip, I think. At that age, I had no sense of the tragic finality of death—only the grand mythology of it, the way it could imbue certain dead people with cultural cachet they probably couldn’t have had if they’d stayed alive long enough to embarrass themselves. In some circles, you become hip by wearing the right clothes or watching the right movies. Why shouldn’t doing the right drugs have the same effect?

When I ran out of Nirvana albums to pirate, I got a copy of Journals, Kurt Cobain’s collected and posthumously published journals (duh). Self-conscious about my obsession, I tried to slip the book unnoticed into a pile my dad was buying me for school, even though those books were pocket-sized paperbacks while Journals was a behemoth with a fire-truck-red cover. The pages were scans, not transcriptions, and his handwriting was all over the place—this word crossed out, that word illegible, every third or fourth word misspelled. Still, Journals was the closest thing I had to a holy relic. I kept that book wrapped in a sweater in my closet to protect it from dust and wear. Every day, I extracted it and kissed its cover like a rabbi would a Torah scroll. Then I dove back into the stormy floodwater of my hero’s brain.

Much of it was difficult to understand, referencing people whose names I didn’t know and referring to conversations I obviously hadn’t witnessed. But one thing came across loud and clear, which was that moody, sensitive Kurt could not bear the attention his band was getting and also could not bear to go back to a time before he’d had it. People want to become famous the same way they wish they could attend their own funerals and hear what their loved ones would say about them. Fame made Kurt a spectator to his own funeral, but the funeral showed no sign of ending, and half the eulogies were insulting. As Nevermind went gold and then platinum, speaker after speaker took the podium to call him a king. No, an idiot. No, a sellout. No, a genius.

I look at his journals now and I think: Jesus! No wonder this guy was hooked on dope. Because if I was hearing all that stuff about myself, being told who I was by people who had never met me, I would have needed to stomp an effects pedal too, change the tone of what I was hearing one way or another. Heroin is the best effects pedal there is. You take some: stomp. And a moment later: fuzz.

• • •

The first time my ex-husband tried to buy heroin, he bought something else by accident. Neither of us caught his mistake for a good hour or so. After all, we’d never tried heroin before. Everything else, yes, notwithstanding a couple of those designer drugs that the most boring guy you know takes at Burning Man every year. But heroin was the Scary Drug again that year. Trying it was like crossing a boundary, and for the first hour after trying it, that’s what we felt: the jangly glory of crossing a boundary.

Then it occurred to him that we really ought to begin feeling something else. “Do you feel anything?” he asked me, which is the kiss of death for any drug experience, really—as soon as you get stuck on whether you can feel the things you expect to feel, you’re sunk.

He was right this time, though. I couldn’t feel anything. I scrutinized the white powder in its baggie like I thought it might crumble under questioning. You caught me! I’m not really heroin! I’m just baking soda from Alvin’s kitchen. For that had been his name, Alvin: my husband’s new heroin guy.

Alvin hadn’t come recommended or anything. If we’d asked, we could have gotten any number of hookups from our friends who had respectable dope habits and actually knew what they were doing, but my husband was loath to ask around—he never wanted to seem like he wasn’t already in the know. He’d found Alvin by overhearing two people at a party describe a certain Baltimore intersection where friendly barkers could be found walking the streets mumbling out their wares: Weed… Cocaine… Xanax. It seemed that one of those benevolent souls would eventually mumble “dope,” and from there, well, we knew what to do. We had dealers for everything else. It had only been a matter of time.

If this sounds to you like a mighty stupid way to buy a product that could theoretically kill you, you’re right. But riskier for me than the possibility of death was the very high probability of a dud evening. I would buy other drugs from other Alvins as the years dragged on and the habit grew desperate. No one else would ever rip me off quite as completely as the original Alvin had, but other street dealers rarely had drugs better than good old-fashioned drinking-myself-into-a-stupor. Worse than the ripping-off was the grandiose lying that accompanied it. An Alvin wasn’t content just to sell me the ground up rat turds, knowing as he must have known, that he could have told me exactly which rat’s ass these turds had issued from, and I would have happily bought an eighth anyway. No, he had to lie, and fabulously; he had to cook up tales of wild adventures he’d had while fucked up on this very cocaine that he was selling me now. The stories were part of the experience, which was designed to rip off and humiliate rather than to get people high.

This time, though, I hadn’t been with my husband when he made the purchase. No Alvin for me: I walked with him to the intersection, which I’d naively expected to look at least a little like an actual market, with booths or stalls. But this intersection was just another intersection, which allowed the Alvins to blend in and avoid police harassment. I stood there drinking a Dr. Brown’s and waiting for my husband to finish the deal, a little embarrassed for him in his tucked-in polo and pleated chinos. This seemed like a silly way to buy heroin, but what did I know?

I’d known more than I’d been giving myself credit for, I realize now, as we tried to convince ourselves that we were feeling what we should feel. “At least we still have weed,” I said soothingly. “Should we smoke a little?”

“I don’t want weed,” said my husband, shriller every minute. “I want the drugs I bought!”

That was the other problem: the cost. We’d just gotten married a week or so prior and all our discretionary expenses were still coming out of the cash gifts we’d received from friends and family. High off the unfamiliar feeling of having money to burn, my husband hadn’t just bought a single bag of dope. He’d spent $300 on Alvin’s rat turds.

“This is just… just unbelievable,” my husband spat now. “It’s bad business!”

I wondered what he expected me to do about that. Call the Better Business Bureau?

“I’ll tell you what this is right here,” he said. “This is racist.”

I burst out laughing. God help me if I laughed at him when he was angry. But I couldn’t help it this time, I really couldn’t. Alvin had indeed been Black, and my husband was white, if that isn’t obvious from the fact that he wore a tucked-in polo and pleated chinos to a drug deal. I should have been panicking, too. I couldn’t afford to lose $300 any more than he could. But as was so frequently the case when we did drugs together, I didn’t take the whole enterprise as seriously as he did. Which meant I didn’t take it seriously enough.

• • •

I wasn’t a globally beloved rock star the day we first attempted to do heroin, but I was a young, insecure woman full of fears I couldn’t dismiss, and that made me the same animal as Kurt Cobain, or at least of the same genus. He doubted himself, I doubted myself, and we arrived at the same conclusion, which was that we would do anything, anything, to numb that doubt.

It turned out we’d known a dope dealer all along, Kimberly. Well, my husband knew her. I only knew her from his telling me that he wanted to sleep with her. He loved to tell me that about women we knew. Kept me on my toes, kept me docile. But Kimberly was deliberately, aggressively kind to me. Solicitous and warm. She chopped us all some lines of heroin. She cooed over the white bow on my headband. She told me how happy she was for our elopement and offered me the mirror first with a big, guileless smile on her pretty face. She ruined it by sleeping with my husband a few weeks later anyway, but in the moment all I felt was gratitude that this woman was sharing her drugs with me. That made her the one who could take away my terror.

We both embarked on a heroin habit that day, but it wasn’t a habit that we shared from then on. I don’t think he ever knew the extent of my dependence on the drug. Part of that was his general policy of inattentiveness towards me, but then, nobody knew, even my close friends. As with every other addiction, I undertook this one quietly and shamefully. He, on the other hand, dove into heroin with gusto, as if his life was a play and he’d beat out everyone else for the coveted part of Dope Fiend.

Where my habit was secret and sad, his was loud and destructive. He totaled one car, stole another. He spent all hours of the night with his new friends while I got high alone. Once in a while we did it together, but mostly I think he was glad for this drug that he didn’t think I liked that much. He did heroin the same way other husbands might wait till their wives are out of the house to watch The Deadliest Catch. He had no idea I’d been in love with heroin from afar ever since reading Kurt’s Journals.

It was the same attitude that would characterize my relationship with all drugs. We all knew doing this stuff was a bad idea. We all did it anyway. I was the only one I knew who did it while pretending not to, sneaky and afraid. I ran in pretty druggy circles my whole life. Why all the secrecy? I’d anticipated this side of myself all my life, and now that she was in charge, all it seemed I could do with her was hide her. If nobody else saw her, I reasoned, maybe she wasn’t really there.

• • •

The Journals meant so much to me when I was a kid, but I look at them now and find them mostly unreadable. There’s a lot of smarmy adolescent self-loathing in the Kurt of these journals, less of the warmth and compassion that renders his music so enjoyable. “If you read you’ll judge” says the book’s cover, and judgment is a recurring theme throughout the journals: who’s doing it, who judges and gets it right, whose judgments are way off base. He makes fun of everyone else, their mustaches, their terrible pop music; he worries that everyone he hates so much—and he hates everyone—hates him right back. On every page, a mind that can’t stop fretting about itself. This stuff is unreadable to me now because it reminds me so much of a self that I’ve worked really, really hard to put behind me and because it isn’t all the way behind me. Now, just like before, I see myself in Kurt Cobain and it moves me. But I’m no longer as open as I was in eighth grade. Kurt moves me, and so, frightened, I put him where he can’t get to me so easily anymore.

“No amount of effort can save you from oblivion,” he writes. “No address, no editor, no ad rates.”

It isn’t all darkness. He’s playful in these pages, too. There are letters to friends and colleagues—one begins “Dear Mark,” with ‘dear’ enclosed in a little silhouette of a deer. In many of these pages, he’s an adult filling his notebooks with lists of his most beloved bands the way a teenage girl would. He seems most inclined to poke fun at himself when he’s writing to somebody else. But in pages that he probably thought no one but he would ever see, he suffers from an ouroboros of confidence that eats itself into the shape of self-hate. At one point, he sardonically describes himself as a “critically acclaimed, internationally beloved, teen idol, demi-god-like blonde front man.” The same sentence goes on for quite some time and lands with him excoriating himself for letting the world learn about his heroin habit. On that page, he worries that people think he’s brave for revealing his truth, when he isn’t; the very next page, he worries that people now think he’s a lost cause, when he isn’t. He doesn’t describe how he feels about himself. I’m left to try to take the average of these opposing fears, the fear that the public hates him and the fear that they don’t.

I was a junkie playing for much lower stakes than these. The whole time I was using, no one knew—no one but the people selling me my dope and the few strangers I shared it with, anyway. I was a junkie in the most comfortable circumstances imaginable, shrouded in every way from the judgments people make about junkies, and I still recognize the contours of Kurt’s self-hate so much it wounds me into putting the book away. If I ever had to show those contours to an audience? If that audience was the entire world? I may well have become lost myself. Climbing out of that hole was hard enough when its edge was as close as I kept it.

I call myself a junkie like I call myself a drunk: because for a significant period of time, the most important work in my world was the buying and consumption of heroin, to the point that I had to heavily modify the rest of my life to suit that work. But I never lost anything to my habit, or in any event the things I did lose—crummy little jobs, one crummy little apartment—were things I didn’t miss. Yes, I wrecked my credit for a time and yes, I lost jobs in three separate restaurants, but a credit score resets after seven years, and there are millions of restaurants in the world to work at, and basically I was the luckiest junkie there ever was. No one knew until much later, when I’d been clean for years and could present my dope habit as the monster I’d killed with my bare hands. By the time anyone learned about my heroin addiction, I was the hero of the story. I played it that way.

As I write this, I’ve been clean from heroin for ten years. It’s hard to be truly proud of conquering an addiction that didn’t really ruin anything, but then, that’s how I’ve approached so many addictions. I step into them on tiptoe, full of so much trepidation I can’t let go. One of my uglier qualities is that I still envy people like Kurt, whose lives went so thoroughly to shit thanks to substance abuse. Some part of me still wishes I had destroyed myself a little more, given myself more to claw back. I can’t wring much nobility-of-the-struggle from my heroin addiction, but it does show who I am: an addict who always knew she was an addict, a coward who never took off her life vest. Well, I’m glad I left my life vest on. I’m glad I didn’t venture too deep.