Reality Check: Making the Best of The Situation - How I Overcame Addiction, Loss, and Prison

by Mike Sorrentino

this book is also a love story. A classic one at that: Boy meets girl. They fall in love. Boy loses girl. After much pain, boy gets girl back. If Shakespeare had been a reality star, he may have written this book.

“I love a success story, but even more than a success story, I like a dude-who-fucks-his-life-up-and-gets-his-life-together-again story.”

If you told me not to smoke weed, I was going to sell coke. If you told me to drive carefully, I would do donuts in the parking lot. In fact, right after I got my license, I smoked angel dust on the way to homecoming in Marc’s hand-me-down Pontiac Sunfire that our father gave me…and wrecked it after hitting a sewer grate and bottoming out. As the car steamed and smoked, I sprinted from the scene.

My girlfriend called me! It was her birthday, and she told me that my son Michael gave her a lap dance at some male strip club!”

Though I have to admit, as a result of those punishments during my adolescence, I now suffer from a rare psychological condition known as “having respect for others.”

I began making weekly runs to Brooklyn, where I’d pick up, say, thirty pounds of weed and ten ounces of coke. On the arm, they called it, or on consignment. I’d take it back to Jersey, where I developed a little crew to help me move the product. We’d sell out pretty quickly, then pay back the $75,000 or so I owed on the next week’s trip to Brooklyn. Rinse and repeat.

My love affair was with the devil: prescription opiates.

When all else fails, you just have to do the next right thing. Put one foot in front of the other to move forward. Eventually, you’ll get there. I promise.

Pain in life is inevitable, and you can’t ignore it. Drugs bury it. They don’t make it go away. When you get sober, all that recessed pain is dug up. You have to work through it to get back to your baseline. Life doesn’t get easier; you get stronger.

When Nicole walked in, the first thing I thought was damn, the party is here! Definitely loud. Maybe fiery is a better way to describe Snooki back then. She looked like a little chihuahua, you know what I mean?

Then, there was Angelina. Ah, Angelina. Little-known fact: I knew Angelina already. We’d actually hooked up a couple of times back in the day when we both were in the same club scene.

I don’t know if I should admit this or not, but the Kim Kardashian of Staten Island wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for me.

That’s right—to show Ronnie how ready I was to throw down, I headbutted a wall. A wall that, like in the States, I was expecting to be sheetrock. No, no, no, not in Italy. Unbeknownst to me, this was some ten-thousand-year-old cement wall from the fucking Romans or some shit.

In the recipe of success, one of the main ingredients is failure. The key is to not give up on yourself. When you come across an obstacle, you have to understand it’s nothing more than a brilliantly disguised opportunity. Keep moving forward, don’t give up, and eventually you’ll find success. Too many people face failure and treat it like a finality. Once you meet failure, it simply means you’ve found a way that didn’t work. Use that knowledge to find another way.

As I searched for a way in, Yolanda, the large and extremely tough nurse assigned to my detox, tackled me from behind. Today, I think what she did was amazing, but at the time, I was like, What the hell? What kind of service am I paying for?

Never let your emotions rule your intelligence. Get outside your body and try to understand what is happening. Understand the bigger picture of things. Get back to your standard operating procedure. Be grateful for today. Be grateful for the simple things like your job and family, food in the fridge, and your health. If you come from a default of positive energy, you attract more blessings and abundance.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

When my lawyers and accountants later audited my finances, they estimated I had spent a staggering $500,000 on drugs, mostly cocaine and oxycodone, during those years.

I instead chose to be in the moment, listen to the music, enjoy my friends’ company, and order some chicken tendies and fries.

A couple months later, on the day he reported to prison, Lauren texted the group with an update: “He’s inside. First thing he did was get a haircut. Now he changed into his comfies and is drinking diet soda.” I laughed, like, this kid is going to be fine.

I got up, brushed my teeth, dressed in a comfy sweatsuit, and tweeted the GIF of Ray Liotta in Goodfellas: “Now take me to jail.”

matter what life throws at you, the only path is forward, one step at a time.