"Are you new here?" I ask her.
"Yes." She looks up at me and
smiles. We are amid the bustling
guidance offices in the beginning of our
11th grade year in
high school.
"A
junior?" I am curious; she has long
dark hair, and piercing
eyes with
devilish eyebrows...
she is very pretty; I smile back at her as she nods.
"You're going to
love it here," I say as I'm beckoned into the office. "I'll see you later."
I never see her again that day. I was on
Adderall, a drug given to those diagnosed with
ADD. It is very similar to
Ritalin -
speed. The drug produces a
euphoria for as much as 12 hours after taking the pills. I was not
prescribed this drug and after an
offer from a
friend, I took
thrice the recommended dosage.
I do not, cannot, normally
approach pretty
girls.
It is later that I look back on the run-in with more
depth.
I take it too far. That girl personifies my
wishes and
dreams - someone I could
care about, who would
care about me in the same way. Those pills gave me the best day of my
life - no exaggeration - and I'd never been so
happy. I could walk up to a
stranger and get to know them,
I could talk to girls candidly, basking in their
shining eyes. The drug let me
escape from my
entrapment of
self-consciousness, my
dweebery.
It makes me want to
scream. Am I
abnormal? Were those
feelings, those
thoughts going through my head, what "
normal" people feel? Is that why they can seem to act so natural around girls and
I can't?
I don't know, and I cannot know. I am a
computer dork, and that is what I've always been: the
geek. Not always negative, but definitely not always positive. Geeks are cursed because despite our
intellectual nature, we still want to
fall in love. We want to be
happy.
Escapism for geeks: yet another reason why
drugs will not go away.