Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing

by Matthew Perry

And that fear is of my own mind; fear of my own thoughts; fear that my mind will urge me to turn to drugs, as it has so many times before. My mind is out to kill me, and I know it. I am constantly filled with a lurking loneliness, a yearning, clinging to the notion that something outside of me will fix me. But I had had all that the outside had to offer!

I write them because someone else may be confused by the fact that they know they should stop drinking—like me, they have all the information, and they understand the consequences—but they still can’t stop drinking. You are not alone, my brothers and sisters. (In the dictionary under the word “addict,” there should be a picture of me looking around, very confused.)

I’m not the biggest fan of confrontation. I ask a lot of questions. Just not out loud.

dig, trying to find some reason why I had spent so much of my life in discomfort and emotional pain. I always understood where the real pain was coming from. (I always knew why I was in physical pain at that moment—the answer was, well, you can’t drink that much, asshole.)

by wanting love but being terrified of abandonment, by wanting excitement, but being unable to appreciate it, by a dick that didn’t work. I was face-to-face with the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell, a fifteen-year-old boy brought up close to the face of eschatology, so close he could smell the vodka on its breath.

But magic never lasts; whatever holes you’re filling seem to keep opening back up. (It’s like Whac-A-Mole.) Maybe it was because I was always trying to fill a spiritual hole with a material thing.… I don’t know.

I can’t decide if I actually like people or not. People have needs, they lie, cheat, steal, or worse: they want to talk about themselves. Alcohol was my best friend because it never wanted to talk about itself. It was just always there, the mute dog at my heel, gazing up at me, always ready to go on a walk. It took away so much of the pain, including the fact that when I was alone, I was lonely, and that when I was with people, I was lonely, too. It made movies better, songs better, it made me better. It made me comfortable with where I was instead of wishing I was somewhere—anywhere—else. It made me content to hang out with the woman in front of me rather than continually wondering if life would be better if I were dating someone else. It took away being an outsider in my own family. It removed the walls all around me, except one, even if for a while. It allowed me to control my feelings and, in doing so, control my world. Like a friend, it was there for me. And I was fairly certain I would go crazy without it.

To quote my therapist, “Reality is an acquired taste,” and I had failed to acquire it.

(See under: The man takes the drink, the drink takes all the rest.) Once I believe the lie that I can just have one drink, I am no longer responsible for my actions. I need people and treatment centers and hospitals and nurses to help me.

I can’t stop. And if I didn’t get ahold of this soon, it was going to kill me. I had a monster in my brain, a monster who wanted to get me alone, and convince me to have that first drink or pill, and then that monster would engulf me.

I was lost. There was nowhere to turn. Everywhere I tried to hide, there I was. Alcoholics hate two things: the way things are and change.

It was time to give myself a break. Drugs hadn’t given me what I needed in a long time, yet I kept going back to them and risking my life in order to … what? Escape? Escape from what? The worst thing I had to run away from was my alcoholism and addiction, so using drink and drugs to do so … well, you can see the logical impossibility. None of it made sense, not even in the slightest. I was smart enough to see that; doing something about it, though … that was another level of math that I hadn’t yet discovered. Change is still scary, even when your life is on the line.