Why do you Drink…?
The most frequent question I get asked at parties is, “how come you don’t drink?”
I usually just let the answer come to me all the while trying to dismiss question.
Though sometimes I like to answer with a question of my own. That usually makes things interesting.
“Well, how come you ‘do’ drink?” I’ll reply.
Then almost on cue, I get this lull of silence; when the person I’m conversing with pretends like they’ve never heard that question before. That can’t be, can it?
Or maybe they’ve never truly thought of why they drink alcohol. Which fascinates me because to do something without knowing why reminds me of my days as a little kid. A little kid running around the garden with a slingshot hurling stones at birds for no apparent reason. The difference is I was seven years old and mindlessly reckless. Most of the people I meet at parties though are in their early twenties and presumably mature, how can they not know why their doing something? (side note; why don’t they teach self-awareness at universities?)
Well I can’t speak for other people — I can’t tell you why they drink, that would be unfair. But I will anyway. I will because I have had many of the same experiences with alcohol as any youth in their early twenties.
5 years ago, before I went sober, I drank because it was cool. It was fun to be a ‘bad-ass’ and I suppose I also wanted to be accepted. But if I go deeper than that, alcohol gave me something that no other legal substance could at the time.
It gave me confidence. “Liquid Confidence” — as some people call it. And in truth, if confidence came in drug form it would be 70% alcohol and taste like the chemicals you mixed in ‘Chem’ class. But people would still drink it…
We all crave confidence. When I drank I would get bubbly, outgoing, a little obnoxious, but most importantly free — free to be careless and casual.
It wasn’t that the alcohol changed me in any way, but it gave me a license to do the things, I admit, I was too afraid to do sober; like chat up women and get hopelessly rejected. It gave me an excuse.
And that excuse, I’ve found is the most powerful thing about alcohol.
Think of a hotel room. One of the most liberating things about staying in a hotel is that the place doesn’t belong to you. You can literally trash the room before midday, leave, let ‘room service’ clean up your mess, and return to a clean and pristine room by the evening. You don’t have to worry about responsibility. You can make the place as dirty as you like because come the afternoon, someone will come and rid you of the mess you created.
It’s this same effect that alcohol has on us. Alcohol is room service. It gives us the license to trash ourselves, do mindless and thoughtless things throughout the night and when we wake up in the morning… hey, it wasn’t my fault… the alcohol made me do it, “I was so drunk last night…”
And at the sound of that excuse, room service swoops in swiftly to rid us of responsibility.
Imagine that. You can make a horrific mess, then cleanse yourself with just one sentence; “I was drunk.” It almost sounds like Sunday morning at church, except Jesus comes in ‘excuse’ form and you don’t have to put your hands together to get redemption for your sins.
Powerful, right?
And for youths like me in our early twenties, exploring ourselves as much as the world around us and chasing experiences like they will soon escape us… We’ll use alcohol like a social ‘get out of jail free card’.
And if you’ve stopped to think about why you actually drink, consider, we don’t drink because we enjoy the taste of alcohol any more than the taste of apple juice. We don’t drink because “I don’t know, I just like it”. We drink for reasons that go deeper than the surface of our mindless reasoning. We drink because at the end of the day, if things get ‘interesting’, we don’t have to take responsibility…
