I listened to Matthew Perry’s book: Friends, Lovers and The Big Terrible Thing.
The first minute in, I couldn’t recognize his voice. It sounded so differently from Chandler’s voice in my memory. I had to rewind to make sure it was indeed voiced by the author. The voice sounded slow and drowsy that I had to speed it up.
It was an incredibly sad story of someone who got lost and never found his way.
From 1996 to 2024, he struggled with addiction to opioid and alcohol, and in the end, he also had to fight nicotine.
He sounded helpless, depressed and exhausted as he told the tale of him trying to get sober and relapse again and again, each time getting worse.
To me, he got lost by holding wrong beliefs without ever realizing they are not true.
Our beliefs, values, or mindsets; the principals we hold to be true, guide our directions in life. If your compass points to the wrong direction, it only leads you deeper and deeper into the woods.
Perry said he just wanted to feel good, he just wanted to get away from the pain. He thought he had to become a better person, only then will he be loved.
He seemed to never questioned these thoughts:
- We are supposed to feel pleasure with no effort, is that true?
- We need to avoid pain at all cost, is that true?
- If people knew the real me, they would not love me, is that true?
Empty dopamine is a trap.
Dopamine lies at the center of the addiction mechanism. It’s about pleasure, about reward.
Rewards are supposed to be earned. Empty rewards without effort are dangerous. They are not real and will never feel real.
Alcohol, drugs, sex, any dopamine inducing entity seems to take on a life for themselves. They talk to you, seduce you, lie to you, manipulate to get you make more of dopamine. Like any DNA carrier - dopamine’s mission is to make more copies of itself.
Dopamine will say that happiness, peace, a better life are just a few inches a way - once you have more of dopamine.
More. More. More.
It’s never enough.
Pain is necessary.
Anna Lembke had a book on addiction, where she said the pleasure/pain balance is the key to understanding addiction.
Pain and pleasure might be two sides of the same coin. When dopamine drops down, pleasure turns into pain.
If you got pleasure for no reason (empty rewards), you end up getting pain for no reason.
Sometimes the pain is real, and many addicts are just self-prescribing dopamine as pain killers.
The right way to deal with pain is to go through it. Avoiding and numbing it with pain killer is like maxing out your credit card. It’s all fine and pretty until the pain shows up at your door with a club and asking for its payment.
Pain “killer” it does not kill the pain, if anything, what doesn’t kill the pain makes the pain stronger.
A bit of discomfort, even pain, is necessary for growth and change. If you lean into the pain and let go of control, you might realize it is not as bad as you think - just like many “good” things don’t feel as good as you think.
Real love is unconditional.
Love is so often used as a behavior shaping tool - bad kids aren’t loved, we were told at a young age. This seems to be fundamentally not true.
Not only is real love unconditional, you cannot put conditions on it even if you want to - love morphs into something else when conditions are attached.
Matthew Perry ran away from fear and pain for over two decades, and it never worked for him. It never occurred to him that maybe he was going in the wrong direction, maybe he should run towards the fear.
He was trapped inside a circle of lies and never found his way out, back to truth.
Almost twenty years after his beloved show Friends ended, he was still struggling with opioids and alcohol, he’s colon exploded, he had 14 surgeries fixing his stomach, his lung kept wheezing at night, and his doctor told him if he didn’t quit cigarette he’d be dead within 10 years.
He seemed to be in denial, he said he had finally got sober - by scaring himself with the image of a permanent colostomy bag. He had deep fear of heroine and never used it, and it saved his life (well, delayed his death). So he came to the conclusion that fear works and he tried to scare himself into sobriety.
His health was in a dire situation, his whole body was in crisis, yet he was still hitting on the hot nurse, and fantasizing to live a long, long life with his family and kids - like Chandler did.
On the other hand, he said he would trade life with anyone around him, with someone lives in an assisted housing project. He’d give everything he had if he to be rid of his addiction. He said nobody would believe him - well, I did. I think he truly wanted to be someone else sometimes, and that he did not fully accept his addiction.
Matthew Perry’s memoir was beautiful but sad. It showed me what a path away from the truth looks like.
It’s yet another case of money not being the solution. Money is an amplifier. If you already have a happy and peaceful life (very few of us do), money would make you happier. For the rest of us, who are confused and lost and struggling with finding inner peace and happiness, money would amplify the confusion and the struggle.
After losing the decade long battle to the big terrible thing, may he finally get to rest in peace.