Writing too much. Thinking too much, about things which are just for me. The rest of my life feels squeezed and compressed, displaced by the tumor of intrusive thoughts.
But that’s the problem with reminiscing. It shakes things loose, and they wake up cranky.
I don’t drink, or do drugs. Which is not to say I’ve never had any alcohol, but rather that I’ve never drank enough to feel it.
It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal. It didn’t really seem like it, back in high school, when a lot of people started. My friends didn’t and I didn’t like most of the popular, party crowd anyway. It was just something that never really got into my life. It turned into this sort of arbitrary line: the people who did thought you were a loser if you didn’t, and I thought they were self-important assholes.
That’s just high school though, and it started to break down as it ended and people realized social status wasn’t going to matter in a few months and started just being themselves. Vince made me rethink a lot of things.
But the mindset was still there. And the disaster of my first college party brought it all raging back, and gave me all the justification I needed. This interesting, attractive girl I have a crush on suddenly gets drunk and turns into a zombie, an infant, incapable of taking care of herself. Boring, pointless, mundane.
The party people were just out to destroy themselves. Drinking transformed interesting, valuable people into empty, pointless shells. It was the great evil of our society, all the worthwhile people I was constantly looking for were just getting eaten up by alcohol.
My college friends and later roommates shared that first college party experience with me, and could see my point. But slowly they got pulled into it because “everyone else was” - imagine my disdain - and at the same time started to get more distant.
A close friend of mine from high school slowly started to reveal that he drank a lot during high school (imagine my feeling of betrayal! one of them!), that he was smoking a lot of pot, that he was trying ever-harder drugs with his new college friends. We fought about it, by which I mean I took it as a personal attack, because here was someone I really liked as a person who seemed determined to ruin himself.
The whole thing colored my life in too many ways.
…
Funny thing happens.
Couple months ago, I’m hanging out with my friend, and one of his from university. They’re drinking, which remains kind of a sore point, but one that I don’t make a habit of pursuing with them anymore. Oddly enough, my close friend is still him, still the guy I thought he was. If anything he’s grown up a lot, we’ve been getting closer and finding more common ground. Bitching at him about drugs or drinking just seems like a dick thing to do.
His friend gets pretty drunk. He’s hanging out in the kitchen with us, in just his boxers, because hey, it’s his apartment, why the fuck not?
And while he’s good and sauced, he starts asking me interesting questions, eventually gets around to asking why I don’t drink. The defense is old and rehearsed at this point, I run through it, think back to that party.
But something’s wrong, you know? Because he’s drunk, having this conversation with me, and it’s getting kind of hard to make the claim that it’s hollowed out anything good and worthwhile about him.
His thought processes aren’t exactly perfectly rational, sure, and he’s less inhibited and so on. But, actually, it’s obviously still him.
Huh.
I had to get my wisdom teeth out a bit after that. He gave me the ride back, while I was still off my rocker from the pain meds and anesthetic. First time I’ve really experienced any kind of chemically induced mind alteration, as a matter of fact. I was rather curious what it would feel like, having only ever seen it from the outside.
I wasn’t thinking normally, obviously, but it was funny. I knew it was still me in there, that the drugs had scrambled the machinery for thinking but the bit that was me was still there.
…
So I’m sitting here thinking about Vince back in high school and the girl I had the crush on at the party, and my friends who do all kinds of shit, and I guess it’s finally dawning on me that I’ve been letting bullshit from high school and bitterness over a girl skew my perceptions way too much.
The girl at the party was just some girl, and it’s not like I knew a lot about her before I saw her drunk. Her drunk was just her, and that’s what disappointed me. But I blamed it on alcohol, because I guess that made a more dramatic story in my head.
Really, it’s not that I hate people drinking. I just hate people, and when they get drunk it gets rather more obvious.
I should stop giving my friends shit, I think, and apologize. Maybe even try getting drunk with them, because they’re good people regardless and looking back, I might have had fun with them if I wasn’t so stuck in thinking what they were doing was terrible, no matter what.
I don’t know. The idea feels weird. It’s not like I think I’m entirely wrong about people using mind-altering shit to destroy themselves, because they do.
But a big part of the whole thing for me… I don’t know, it was some kind of martyrdom. I was tragically separated from everyone else, because I was doing the right thing and they were doing the wrong thing, and yes, I am that self-righteous in my head sometimes.
It was a big part of my life for a while. It’s stopped mattering as much, but it’s still there.
It was an easy excuse for not getting to know people, if I’m honest. An easy way to distance myself from them, an easy difference to use as an excuse.
You have no idea how bitter it is being forced to admit that.
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