Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing

by Matthew Perry

If the golden ticket to sobriety involved hard work and learned information, this beast would be nothing but a faint unpleasant memory.

I don’t write all this so anyone will feel sorry for me—I write these words because they are true. 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.

shrink whose mantra is “reality is an acquired taste”

The best thing about me, bar none, is that if a fellow alcoholic comes up to me and asks me if I can help them stop drinking, I can say yes, and actually follow up and do it. I can help a desperate man get sober.

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

Being in hospitals makes even the best of us self-pitying,

I didn’t know this at the time, of course, but if I was not in the act of searching for excitement, being excited, or drunk, I was incapable of enjoying anything. The fancy word for that is “anhedonia,”

Ten years later, I read the following words in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous: “Drinkers think they are trying to escape, but really they are trying to overcome a mental disorder they didn’t know they had.”

“Reality is an acquired taste,”

Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. About thirty pages in I read: “These men were not drinking to escape; they were drinking to overcome a craving beyond their mental control.”

When I try to work out how sobriety and addiction work for me, I keep coming back to this line: I’m capable of staying sober unless anything happens.

In the appendix, “The Spiritual Experience,” at the end of AA’s Big Book, I read this: Quite often friends of the newcomer are aware of the difference long before he is himself.