Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing

by Matthew Perry

Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name. My friends call me Matty. And I should be dead. If you like, you can consider what you’re about to read to be a message from the beyond, my beyond.

I have no fear of talking in front of twenty thousand people, but put me alone on my couch in front of a TV for the night and I get scared. 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.

It is very odd to live in a world where if you died, it would shock people but surprise no one.

I don’t need a pill at six o’clock in the morning. I need it when it’s scary at night. I can’t find the center of the fear—it’s general.

You can track the trajectory of my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season—when I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills.

It was not lost on me that Chandler had grown up way faster than I had.

I needed to realize that when I died, I wanted my Friends credit to be way down on the list of things I had accomplished.

I don’t want to die. I’m scared to die.