Happy People Are Annoying

by Josh Peck

You are an amalgamation of trauma;

Can you believe that? No bucket list? No vision boards?

My birth alone was fraught with an innumerable amount of fuckery

We’re all playing catch-up.

From the moment we’re born we’re the beneficiaries of millennia of struggle.

We’ve inherited the best and worst of everyone who came before us, we had...

We didn’t elect to be born, pick our parents, our circumstances,...

People we’ve never met, people we’ve never even thought about, all had a hand in the hand we were dealt and it’s our job, as far as I can tell, to correct the ...

(I hate that sentence a lot.)

A surprise is a birthday party, a mistake is a DUI. A surprise is a winning lotto ticket, a mistake is getting caught smuggling drugs at the airport. They’re two very different things, and yet somehow, me being born can be categorized as both. It’s interesting to be able to assign different words to the same thing and have them both be true.

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

And then it all fell apart again.

Sticking with the theme of high highs and low lows in the Peck household, in 1998 my mom and I found ourselves broke. Again. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. I was twelve now and pissed. As I got older, the stress of being displaced started to weigh on me. There was always a sense of impending doom the months leading up to it—disaster was ahead. I’d notice my mom acting differently, incredibly stressed, tired, and then sort of manic as she went into hyperdrive trying to save us. Inevitably it always ended the same way, she’d tell me we had two weeks to pack up our stuff, and when those two weeks were up, we’d move back to Florida, or maybe California, or maybe just . . . just pack your stuff. She’d make it seem like it was on our terms, like we were choosing to live this nomadic life, right up until the moment we handed in our keys and had to figure out where we were sleeping that night.

I don’t know when the light turns on in our consciousness, when the veil of adolescence falls and we clue into the real world around us, but for me, it was that summer. I remember suddenly and overwhelmingly feeling the stakes of my life for the first time—being broke, being powerless, and thinking, I gotta do something about this.

We all need an Albie, someone with power who is willing to take a chance.

From what Dan has told me, Drake and I definitely did not come to mind when the question was posed.

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.

Over the next five years we shot sixty episodes and two movies. I was fifteen when it started, nineteen when it finished. It was high school for me—and my sentiments toward the show mimicked that of a high school experience. In the moment, there were times when I just wanted it to be over, but now I look back on the experience fondly, appreciating all that it gave me.

I know some of you reading this book might be interested in the doldrums of what happened on the set, the stories, the drama (which there wasn’t much of), what it was like to have a hit show on television at sixteen. But for me, it didn’t have much of an impact. I mean we were a hit show, sure, but kids’ TV shows weren’t the star-making factories they are today. It was kind of just a job. Don’t get me wrong, a great job, one in which I was getting to perform my favorite kind of comedy, but when we wrapped, I’d go home to an apartment complex and watch hockey with my friend who lived in my building.

Our names would become synonymous with each other forever.

It’s a long life but there’s certainly a chance that Drake & Josh will be the most noteworthy thing either of us ever do.

You can’t choose what triggers the zeitgeist, what implants itself in the minds of the masses, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Jim Carrey is one of our most talented performers alive and without question has done work that far surpasses his early comedic performances, but how good is Ace Ventura?! This i...

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...

Similarly, when Drake got into legal trouble, people ran to get my opinion. They thought I must have a take on this person I had spent so much time with, when in reality, it had been years since we’d talked and even longer since we’d seen each other. Which is why alongside everyone else who doesn’...

I’ll probably get in trouble for this next sentence. But being a successful kid actor is kind of like doing porn. You can be super successful and make money doing it but when it’s over, what do you do? OF COURSE there are examples of those who have transitioned to adulthood successfully but for every Shia LaBeouf or Zendaya, there are a thousand stories of burned-out former kid stars who inform the collective opinion....

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.

This goes back to the first conceit of this book, that we are all an amalgamation of trauma. If you’ve spent your entire life carrying an invisible backpack full of metaphorical stones around, stones full of past experience, painful memory, and regret, then you shouldn’t be surprised when your knees start to buckle under the undue weight of such impedimenta.

“Find the people who support you to be what you want to be, who push you to be your very best, and if you find yourself in a room with someone who doesn’t make you feel that way, leave immediately.”

When you’re angry, everything is personal and nothing is random. You take on the injustice of the world, and if there’s no injustice, you create it. It felt good to be on the offensive, powerful.

Another day sober, put it in the bank.

“Too much sunshine brings about a desert,” a friend once told me. The universe demands balance, I guess the same could be said about life.

As sure as the tough times are coming, the good times are coming too. Joy will come as quickly and as strongly as sadness will and the cycle will repeat in a beautifully fucked-up ballet of ups and downs till the sun eats the earth. But I now know one thing for sure:

The hard times are here to teach us, and the good times are to remind us w...

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.