Happy People Are Annoying

by Josh Peck

You are an amalgamation of trauma; I hate to break it to you.

We’ve inherited the best and worst of everyone who came before us, we had no say in the matter.

It’s not like she was under the impression my dad was going to stick around, leave his family, and move us to Long Island so I could play lacrosse and develop a really unfortunate accent.

Jewish mothers love to send their kids off to camp to heal them from the food issues they implanted themselves when they wouldn’t excuse us before we finished our plates.

As I got a little older, I did what any self-respecting, overweight kid deeply uncomfortable with their appearance and navigating the social battlefield of puberty would do. I decided to be on television.

If I could make you laugh then perhaps you wouldn’t make fun of me. In fact, if I could make you laugh, perhaps I could control the entire conversation or even the entire energy of the room. Comedy is like a superpower you can employ whenever you want.

“The reason why people are funny is usually not funny at all.”

Mom spending her days looking for work and me spending my days with my best friend. Television. Throughout my life, television has been my best friend, my babysitter, my teacher, and, most importantly, my escape. I left it on to feel like someone was there, I fell asleep to it, so the room never got dark. I watched Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka and forgot I was broke. I watched Sleepless in Seattle and wished Tom Hanks was my dad. I watched Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire and thought, This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.

Six months later we were filming the pilot for Drake & Josh, my own TV show. I was fifteen, it felt like a second ago I was in that apartment with my mom going broke, wondering how I was going to save us, and now, well, it was just very different.

This perhaps could explain why over a decade after the show ended, the world went insane when I got married and didn’t invite Drake to my wedding. Now when I say insane I mean it in its most literal sense, in that people were “in a state of mind which prevents normal perception.” People couldn’t fathom that we’d only seen each other a handful of times since the show ended; they insisted that they had just seen us together, wackily trying to escape a tree house with no doors.

Funny thing about taking your life into your own hands, though, is once you have it, there’s no one to blame. It’s now solely your responsibility to make something happen and if it all falls apart, well, that’s on you. And that’s exactly what happened, when I set my life on fire.

Drugs lifted the pain of existence so well that I mistook being high for being alive.

Soon, I wasn’t the guy from Vine anymore, I was the guy from YouTube.

Maybe who I was as a teenager and in my twenties didn’t have to inform who I was for the rest of my life. Maybe I could begin again.

The hard times are here to teach us, and the good times are to remind us what we’re fighting for.

Just know I almost gave up a thousand times. Just know that despite how good my life is, when faced with adversity, my mind still romanticizes getting a bunch of drugs and some White Castle hamburgers and seeing what happens. Just know that I still don’t really feel comfortable at parties. Just know that you can do whatever I did but better, and that when you do, I’ll expect you to write the book for the next round of people like us.