Looking back at when you started drinking, you experience nostalgia, and possibly nausea. Your emotions range from sighing about the good old days to thinking ‘oh god, why’, not knowing whether you’re grateful about them ending or wistful. But you know full well that that initiation has gotten you to where you are today, someone who pretends to now have better capacity.
The first drink: Who doesn’t remember their first drink? This is the one that felt like poison going down your throat as you tried to understand why people enjoy this at all. When the first two shots didn’t hit you, you went on to do 5 more, and boy, did you pay for that. You passed out on the stairs outside the bar while your friends tried desperately to get you home but it’s still one of your favourite memories.
The first hangover: When you’re younger, hangovers seem almost mythical. You can drink like a tanker the night before, party hard and get right back to binge-drinking in the morning, unscathed. But as time passes, the inevitable gets closer, and then finally you have it – your first horrible, devastating hangover. At this point you don’t even know what to do to help your poor head out, so you just lie there, expecting death to take you away. And now you know that they never get better.
The first ‘I’m never drinking again’: Oh yeah, we all remember that blatant lie. After smashing a glass at a house party, purging yourself over a toilet while your friends hold your hair back and just being dramatic, you woke up and decided to never drink again. Your friends were pumped to join you on this detox journey, when you announce this. And you actually did go ahead with it, till a couple of days later.
The first drink you like: In the brief time since you started drinking, you’ve only had alcohol that you’ve absolutely detested or others that you have found tolerable. It’s been a wild ride but there’s nothing like coming across ‘the one’. Finding the one drink that will most probably continue to be your companion for life, is another high altogether.
The first time you were the last person standing: This is an achievement that only you truly understand the gravity of. The first time you feel completely sober after a night of chugging down bottles, as you walk around the house while every house party guest slowly but surely passes out, you come to realise how far you’ve come. You held your liquor, and now you are truly a drinker. Please, try not to cry.
