Oh alcohol. I still drink to your health.
I came to my computer tonight to write about alcohol because boy do I have a complicated relationship with it. I hate alcohol now but want to write my first time getting drunk as it was one of the most amazing and positive experiences I had as a teenager.
I’m currently worried about a friend who has gone far too far down the booze rabbit hole.
When an alcoholic has gone this far for so many years and destroyed their liver kidneys family and mental health, it’s just hard to comprehend. I haven’t really drank since immediately before the pandemic. Cuz I was a bit of an alcoholic just a wee bit, but I never drank alone. Booze helped me greatly with my social anxiety but harms me when it comes to writing or programming and doesn’t enhance TV or alone activities for me, so when the lockdown hit, yeah, I felt like I needed alcohol to be social but there was no social so I just stopped drinking. Then my roommate became drunk all the time–at least I think. She never came out of her room because she was terrified of COVID and I just heard constant clinking like beer bottles from her room and she started acting like real weird after awhile. So when the lockdown was over, I remember I got pretty tipsy at a kinky camping event, like the first one after the lockdown, and something just felt off. Like I felt like I was cheating and was much more aware of how I had been using alcohol as a crutch for my social anxiety and that it was actually holding me back from making real human connections.
So now I have like no desire to drink. I remember exactly how it felt to be drunk and remember how super fun it was, but it just sounds awful to me now.
I guess I listened to a whole lot of self help books over these years that casually drop science bullshit about how even a drink here and there reduces your lifespan, ability to sleep and cognitive ability.
Now I realize it’s true. Even the “responsible drinking” of like one or two drinks a night I was doing before COVID was doing a crazy amount of harm to me and I was in denial about it. My life is so much better now that I don’t drink with the exception of a tiny taste if my friends make a homebrew.
Anyway, my first time getting drunk was when I was 17 I think, a junior in high school, or maybe I was 18 and I was a senior–no it had to be 17 cuz it had such an effect on my schooling. I’d have to check my old journal to be sure.
But we planned it out, me and my best buddy. We were going to a party on saturday night and had permission to sleep over and knew no one was driving so we planned ahead like responsible teens 🙂
So Friday night I got all my homework done because I’d seen so many shows about alcohol giving you a hangover. Sunday was my homework day usually. I always put it off til sunday but this was one of the only times I could remember that I was actually motivated to get it done early because come Monday I did not want anyone suspecting I had been out drinking.
So I got home friday and busted right through my homework for the weekend in a couple hours, which just felt like it would have taken way longer on Sunday where procrastination is like, just kind of a rule that I can’t escape.
So Saturday night me and my buddy go to this little party, there’s really only like 15 of us maybe, all of us underage, but it’s a nice house and they’ve got lots of booze so we just started experimenting. We were like planning our escape if the cops came at one point.
Anyway, something opened up for me emotionally, like once I got into the alcohol, my whole world view started changing. I suddenly started talking to people and having fun and breaking free in ways I’d never experienced or heard of before. Before this I’d been so inundated with depression and social anxiety, just this terror that I might offend people.
But here it didn’t matter, all that fear and stress was just gone and replaced with just fun and joy of life.
And I hit on a girl, like only the the third time in my entire life I had had the courage to express my attraction to anyone, and I did it super tacky like: I yelled “why aren’t you naked?” at her.
I think that’s the most disrespectful thing I’ve ever knowingly said to anyone… I think… I hope.
(Okay, Sadly I’m sure I’ve done something worse at some point as I didn’t used to be a particularly sensitive person, but I was probably too wrapped up in myself to notice.)
And she came at me yelling and thank god she did cuz she had some deep shit to say. She got right up in my face and said something, I don’t remember the actual words she used but it conveyed this to me: “If we’re going to engage in underage drinking then it’s actually MORE important to be on good behavior and remember our ethics, because if we act like jackasses then that’ll just prove to the adults that they’re right that we shouldn’t be allowed to do this.”
And I remember thinking that was so profound, I was like holy shit she’s right. I need to fully focus on my ethics even if I’m shitfaced. If I don’t, it’s not gonna go well for me.
Holy balls am I thankful she got up in my face that night instead of just running away from me. Things changed for me in that moment.
It was so deep that I just started laughing. I couldn’t stop. Something so profound and beautiful had happened. I’d overcome my fears with women but had failed about as miserably as possible but my failure had led to an insight that I could not have gotten otherwise and one that may save my ass, and at the same time learning that a failure is just a moment in time and doesn’t need all that stress. The situation was just so funny.
It’s like for the first time I saw life as a story. A story of wins and fails, but one that is deeply, uniquely beautiful.
So I laughed in her face and she called me a jackass or something and I don’t think I talked to her again after that night. Wish I’d gone and talked to her and apologized back then but I didn’t have the words or the courage. Now I don’t remember who she was.
So next morning I wake up at this house with a little tummy ache but nothing serious. I’d been plastered the night before but never puked and felt almost normal now.
Then we watched Braveheart. Then I tried to get folks to go to Denny’s with me for breakfast but no one wanted to so I went alone, but still found myself at home in the early afternoon, really surprised how good I felt. I’d expected to be sick with a hangover, instead I felt better than most sundays.
No stress. All my homework was already done.
Why the hell had I never gotten my homework done on Friday before? I had never understood how good it feels to get ahead on your work and feel that day off that you really earned. It was like in the book I’m listening to now, A Liberated Mind, they talk about all these rules you tell yourself that you then follow that really have no value but sometimes if you’re not careful these nonsensical rules that don’t actually address any real problem, will come to rule your life.
I had a bunch of those stuck in my head, such as my rule that sunday was homework day. Stupid rules.
And it occurred to me that I could take it a step further. So I sat down and I read ahead in I think it was my math book. I’d never really considered reading ahead before but there was never an actual rule against it, there was just this rule I’d invented in my head. Teacher’s never say “don’t read ahead”. I guess sometimes they do but it’s rare.
After that weekend I saw work differently, and started really thinking outside the box on how to get things done.
And that combination of learning to break the rules along with that girl’s wisdom about keeping your ethics, something clicked for me. Yes, you can break the rules, but you MUST MUST MUST keep your ethics, respect and compassion while doing so. Think it through and figure out the best way toward real success instead of blindly following rules and procedures.
After this experience my grades went up while my stress and stress related bowel issues went down. I didn’t drink again for a while, just because we didn’t have access. But just this one experience was enough to open my eyes and improve my entire life. I was still depressed, but it was a solid notch lower.
But also, something made me deeply angry.
Like DARE had lied to me. Why the hell didn’t they tell us about these kinds of experiences? Why is this side of alcohol and drugs not acknowledged when we talk to kids about drugs? How the hell are kids supposed to trust adults when they hide these kinds of things from us?
They teach drugs like it’s all black and white. Their hearts are in the right place because they’ve lost loved ones to drugs, but painting it all black and white like that and not talking about the positive things is blatantly misleading and dishonest and kids sense that and lose respect for the whole darn system and to a degree their whole community.
I mean, I can’t be the only one who had positive experiences like this. Kids are going to hear from other kids who had experiences like mine and they’re going to want that for themselves. If you’re trying to force total abstinence on your kids, and I’m not saying that’s a bad idea–I’m not a parent and I don’t have any good answers to that. I’m just saying that you’re going up against other kids who have stories like mine.
And also I was just mad that most people would vote to take this experience away from me and replace it with me getting hunted down by the cops and arrested. That thought was horrifying to me.
It made me feel like society hated me for having this experience.
After that, listening to people argue for tougher underage drinking laws, it felt like they hated me and wanted to deny my existence, or at least my experience.
So it was like, beautiful and also demoralizing at the same time. Like I’d found this beauty that I could never share with anyone for fear of the hate.
But ALSO I realized, maybe all those drunks living under the bridges who destroyed their lives started just the way I did with this profound experience.
I knew I had to be careful.
You can’t have something that positive and amazing without a dark side.
So I did kind of play it careful. Not as careful as I should have. I wish I’d read some of those self help books in my twenties that talked about the subtle ways that alcohol harms you so that I’d think to watch for it while I was drinking. So I became a “social drinker” and thought I was fine cuz I did it less than most others.
But it was a lie.
Yes, that first time getting drunk was probably one of the best choices I ever made in life, but continuing to drink after that was one of the worst.
The more I learn about alcohol the more disgusted I am by it.
I want to make my house a dry house. Tricky because I love throwing parties. I have no desire for alcohol. I find it physically and morally repulsive as I’ve seen it destroy more lives than I can count in the years since that first time I drank and it feels like every year that goes by the frequency of alcohol related issues in my friends and family goes up.
And statistics I’ve randomly googled seem to be telling me that alcohol consumption is steadily going up but also that abstinence is gaining much more popularity. Seems more alcohol is being concentrated into fewer people.
It’s a huge problem that’s costing a lot of lives and a crazy amount of money and resources. Something needs to be done on a larger scale, but we’ve already shown that prohibition doesn’t work and I’m still disgusted by harsh underage drinking laws that treat kids like criminals when they are just humans seeking a human experience.
So it’s a complicated issue for me.
Okay I was just about to call this entry done but thought of something real important: my experience would not have been necessary if I’d had access to decent mental health resources. I mean, i hate to keep harping on self help books, but like, why in the hell did I never discover them until I was in my 30’s?
Why did no teacher ever tell us these things existed.
You can just go read (or in my case listen to audio books and watch youtube videos) about your problem and get information to solve it. Brilliant. I didn’t realize that was a thing until I was in my 30’s.
But okay, that’s not my point. I guess that’s just one example of how mental health just isn’t addressed in our world.
Never did I have a mental health class in school. Things would have been so different if mental health was a major topic like reading writing and rithmatic in schools and it was taught at least as well as my self help books.
Oh Golly gee willikers two hours of writing. Midnight. I always just keep going and going after putting it off. I don’t feel like starting but then when I start writing I can’t tear myself away.