Free Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher

latter (excruciatingly moody) but from where old Doc Stone sat, I was simply excessively moody. Hey, maybe the whole show hadn’t kicked in yet. Or better still, maybe the drugs were suppressing my symptoms to a certain extent.
    I mean, that’s at least in part why I ingested chemical waste—it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffsNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-volume read.
    I used to refer to my drug use as putting the monster in the box. I wanted to be less, so I took more—simple as that. Anyway, I eventually decided that the reason Dr. Stone had told me that I was hypomanic was that he wanted to put me on medication instead of actually treating me. So I did the only rational thing I could do in the face of such an insult—I stopped talking to the Stone, flew back to New York, and married Paul Simon a week later.
    Jump-cut to two years after that and you’ll find me overdosing. Not that that was my intention by any means—that was simply the amount of drugs that had become necessary for me to take to get where I wanted to go. My destination being, simply, anywhere but here. But somehow en route to that numb place, I’d overshot my mark and almost arrived at nowhere but dead. Well after that happened, I was quite naturally upset and terrified. I had in no way intended to risk my life. I just wanted to turn the sound down and smooth all of my sharp corners. Block out the dreadfully noisy din of not being good enough—which on occasion I was actually able to do.
    But how had I managed to end up at the destination of dead when that was never the direction I originally set off in? It’s as if I tripped and almost fell into my own grave. My only intent was to feel better—which is to say, not to feel at all.
    So based on the fact that my best thinking got me in an emergency room with a tube down my throat, I had no trouble at all accepting the fact that I was an alcoholic. Not that I drank all that much—you might say I took pills alcoholically. Anyway, I didn’t have any difficulty accepting the notion that my life had become unmanageable. I mean, let’s face it, my most creative achievement at that time was having unnecessary gum surgery just for the morphine. (I don’t think you can use the word “just” and “morphine” anywhere near each other.) So I threw myself into twelve-step group recovery—believing now that alcoholism was the headline, the overriding thing wrong with me. Which was, of course, in large part true and remains true to this day.
    Because I have to admit (well, I don’t have to
    ), periodically I have had drug slips. All in, I’ve had about four or five slips since I first started going to twelve-step support groups at the age of twenty-eight. Making that four or five slips in twenty-three years, which is not great. I mean, I’m not proud that I wasn’t able to remain sober that entire time—especially in terms of my daughter, who has had to suffer the most from these largely inexcusable forays back down the dark path that is drug use. The most painful thing about returning to this dark planet is seeing the look of disappointment and hurt that these forays invariably put in the eyes of your loved ones. But ultimately you could say that I don’t have a problem with drugs so much as I have a problem with sobriety. And it wasn’t Alcoholics Anonymous that failed me—it’s that I have, on occasions, failed them by not working what they call a good program. But I keep going back. I’m as addicted to all the things A.A. has to offer as I am to the things that made me need those groups in the first place.
    But when I first got to twelve-step land—after my stomach pumping incident—I thought, Okay, fine then, this is what the matter is with me. I’m not going to shrinks anymore. My best shrinking and thinking got me into emergency rooms all over Southern California. So I planned to be an all-meeting-all-the-time gal. Psychiatrists were a thing of the past. Why, they