Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: the one with Chandler Bing

I’m a huge Friends fan so when BING came out with a memoir, I jumped the gun, saw it at Costco, swiftly bought it, and read it within half a day.

What is the Big Terrible Thing?

I entered the book without any assumptions about Matthew Perry. I knew he bullied Justin Trudeau as a boy and lived out his early childhood in Ottawa. I knew he was Canadian-American. I knew his parents divorced, and I expected him to be a walking Chandler Bing straight from the sitcom. That he was. Matthew brought a lot of his own life and mannerisms, way of talking, and 2/10 pitched punchlines into the character of Chandler, as he portrayed and developed this character while on set. I think it’s fair to say that Chandler is an alter-ego of Matthew himself.

But what completely startled me was his struggle with addiction. Previously, I did not know, grasp, fathom, or understand how an addiction can completely consume you and every waking second of your life. “Reality is an acquired taste.” An acquired taste! To think that my “normal”, my reality, is so underwhelming for someone who has to be high all of the time and that without drugs in their bloodstream, they feel like they are going through the experience of dying, all of the time.

(I think it’s important to note that from a harm reduction pov, we cannot attempt to minimize or ignore the real and tragic harm and danger that can be associated with illicit drug use, and at the same time, understand that people who use drugs face a lot of stigmas, and a non-judgmental and non-coercive approach is needed to meet individuals where they are at, and recognize that the act of using drugs is inherently going to be a continuum of behaviours.)

I joked that I could take a shot before interviews just to get my confidence flowing, but I just realized how some people do drink like that. It’s a type of escape from something that is inescapable for Matthew.

The charming smiling Chandler was struggling with a cocktail of drugs to operate on a baseline level, drinking vodka tonics every single night to find a sense of calmness. He poured so much money that I cannot even picture into therapy and checked into rehab like it was a seasonal routine (probably throwing in around $9 million), and felt like he was dying, and almost fucking died, when he was coming off of drugs. People can party, and some can switch into party mode, and then switch off to still wake up at 6am sharp for work, but for Matthew, once he touched it (it being Vicodin, cocaine, heroin, Oxycontin, Xanax, hydrocodone, list goes on) he would relapse. If he cut some drugs out cold turkey, he could actually physically die from Pain (Matthew says that this pain has a capital P), because of how his body was so equilibrated to this constant intake.

This one thing can take everything in your life away and swing it out of control. Unfathomable. His addiction screwed over many other parts of his life. He screwed over many people he loved and he cared about because he was deeply insecure. He couldn’t live a normal life. He had so many girlfriends (at least he says) and he could have married any one of them (in his mind), but he initiated breakups with almost every single person, afraid of them finding out who he truly was. This addiction/disease interfered with his life so much that it became his life.

And I fully believe in Matthew when he says that he would switch places with anyone without his fame and “success”, in a heartbeat, if that meant he was clean his whole life. Struggling with an addiction is so much disintegration of a person’s identity and knocking them down until there is nothing left. In rehab, he’d stare at a wall, literally waiting and counting for minutes to pass. Withdrawing from nicotine, he’d leave his hospital bed, almost delusional, and bam his head against a wall, bleeding. He has scars all over his lower abdomen because of his exploding colon from constipation caused by opiates and vomited into his ventilator until his vomit was in his lungs. His heart stopped for 5 minutes and he broke 8 ribs from chest compressions. He was on 1800mg of some type of drug every single day to feel normal, when a generous doctor prescribes five 1mg pills for a patient with a broken thumb. He had pancreatitis from drinking when he hit 30. To be honest, this isn’t a way of living. And it’s just so, so, so sad to think that Matthew Perry might not be able to live very long because of this brute damage he’s been pounding onto this body.

Those are only moments of this unending struggle he’s been on. For him, it’s the movie Groundhog Day over again and again and again and again. It was exhausting to read, so it must have been exhausting for him to live.

I just think that it illuminated something in me that I didn’t know I was so grateful for. I’m just relieved I’m not going through this. Five decades of withdrawals, relapses, being so sad that he couldn’t even cry in rehab, and calculating dosages every waking minute of when he can take the next pill enough to make him feel something, but not enough to kill him, how many he can take, which hour, and where and when.

He cried out of relief when he felt hope, when his dampened brain could feel some type of emotion. Wow, and to ever think I have reached a so-called nadir in my life. How I move through the world puts blinders on me, so much that I can’t see what a nadir could be.