Review: Cary Grant takes acid. Fiction ensues.
“I was not always an addict—not all the time—and I am not now.”
We say it all the time, but this is the first time I have ever said it aloud, and it might actually be the last time—which makes me sad. Because I don’t know why that sentence has come to mean what it does to me. I was never an addict “all the time.” In fact, if one reads the full article that I wrote for Time, it appears he was a heroin-addicted, cocaine-addicted, alcohol-addicted, sex-addicted, meth-addicted, marijuana-addicted, cocaine-addicted, sex-addicted, and alcohol-addicted man in his twenties, but now he is a sober, non-addicted man. One of the things that I admire about Cary Grant is that he went from a man who was addicted to heroin to a man who is not. He is an amazing human being, and as someone who had a few moments of addiction myself, I have to say I am just grateful he got sober.
I have read his quotes in interviews more than once. Not because I necessarily disagree with anything he has said, but because I find myself doing the same thing when speaking to addicts who say, “I am not an alcoholic/drug addict/etc.”
“Don’t say I am not an addict because I am.”
It is true. I have been a drug addict, sex addict, sex addict/alcohol addict, drug addict/alcohol addict, sex addict/alcohol addict/drug addict, sex addict/alcohol addict/drug addict, and drug addict/alcohol addict/sex addict/drug addict for the past twenty years. So when anyone tells me I am not an addict, I have to ask them, do they have a problem with me being a drug addict, sex addict, sex addict/alcohol addict, drug addict/alcohol addict, sex addict/alcohol addict