never hungover again

The first time I came into contact with alcohol, I was fourteen years old. At that time, I was a very childlike person, while others started dating and doing their makeup, I was still pretending to be a horse with my friends during lunch break at school.

Anyway, I was watching Vlogmas videos by one of my favorite YouTubers, my highlight of every day during that December. It was a few days before Christmas in 2014, and said YouTuber had a sleepover with her friend. Suddenly, they were drinking, not a lot, just a little until they were tipsy and giggling. She was only a year older than me and I couldn´t believe my eyes. Something in my little innocent universe broke that day. I know I´m making this sound dramatic, but it was a huge deal to me, I couldn´t stop thinking about it for days. A person I felt like I knew and looked up to was drinking alcohol. This didn´t fit into my picture of the world back then.

A few months later, I had my own first drink of alcohol. It was at a friend’s birthday party, and I remember how exciting it felt to do something we weren´t supposed to do.

The drinks were colorful and tasted sugary sweet, catered towards an audience of young teenagers. And it worked, the fun colors and the sweet taste really made it feel less intimidating. I was tipsy, and I loved the way I felt. I felt more confident, more outgoing and less like the quiet girl that people saw me as in school.

Slowly, drinking merged its way into our normal hangouts, we sat in parks and fields and had some drinks. It was all fun, I´d say we were responsible drinkers at that time. We played truth or dare and talked about our crushes and overall had a blast.

It wasn´t until I started drinking hard liquor that things got more serious. If I only stuck to beer and the colorful sweet drinks, maybe my drinking habits would´ve been fine.

Looking back, I don´t remember the night I blacked out for the first time. Well, obviously, otherwise it wouldn´t have been a blackout, but I don´t remember when I first noticed nights becoming so blurry that I couldn´t recall everything that happened.

It never occurred to me that not remembering huge chunks of the night before due to excessive drinking isn´t something to brag about. It was normal, I never really questioned anything. I can´t remember things from the night before but my friends can´t either, so it´s fine. Drinking until vomiting isn’t a bad thing, everyone does it. It just happens, it´s part of the game. In fact, vomiting next to my friends and then passing out together on the bathroom floor felt like bonding time.

I never even questioned it when the bartender at a club had to call an ambulance to rush me into the ER because of alcohol poisoning. The next day, my friends and I laughed it off. “Shit happens,” I said. Maybe I´ll stop drinking for a bit, I thought to myself when my parents picked me up from the hospital the next morning. They weren´t stoked, especially because the plan I told them about, having a sleepover at my friend’s place to study didn´t match the fact that the ambulance scraped me off the floor in front of a club in a nearby city. Since I was still underage, of course my parents had to be informed. They brought me a change of clothes and dropped me off at school straight from the hospital. “Whoever can party and drink can go to school the day after,” they said. I might stop drinking for a bit, I thought to myself when walking up the stairs to my classroom. A week later, summer break started. My friends and I went to Spain, and we partied for a week straight. It was fun, I think, I don´t remember that much.

In a way, I think it was just part of being a teenager. Testing limits and being irresponsible while also having a lot of fun. I´m not gonna lie, it was a lot of fun. It always was, every night, until it wasn´t anymore because my head was resting on a toilet seat, everything was spinning while my friend was holding back my hair telling me I´d be fine over and over again.

During a time of struggle, I met a new friend, let´s call her Mary. Mary and I really hit it off, we both struggled with the same thing (a massive crush on our teacher, though not the same one) and a tendency towards uncontrolled drinking. We both shared the same dream of leaving our small hometown behind and looking back now, I´m happy that we both did. We spent a lot of time together, getting drunk and sharing comfort in making each other feel less alone. She just understood me in a way no one else did. Our time together was precious, but not exactly healthy. We both couldn´t stick to our limits, and we crossed the line almost every time. “We´ll just have one drink, it´s a school night,” we always said, and somehow ended up vomiting in a bush on our way home from sitting on a bench talking until 3 am.

Sometimes, we met up before school to have a little drink. I remember having a badminton match during which we both couldn´t stop hysterically laughing because we had leftover wine at 7 in the morning before gym class. We joked about an “emergency vodka” in our school locker that wasn´t actually just a joke.

To this day, Mary is the person who has seen me at my absolute worst, depressed, drunk with vomit in my hair and all over my clothes. We dreamed about opening a Tequila Bar in Panama one day.

Eventually, school ended in the summer of 2019. We all graduated and went our own ways. I continued to party, had phases of drinking regularly and phases of not drinking at all.

I went to Mexico and fell for someone, a very magical time. We also drank quite a lot together, day-drinking at the beach and partying at night. She did drugs and looked so fucking good doing so, we squeezed into bathroom stalls and I just looked at her doing lines. I could´ve looked at her for hours, I really adored her and everything about her. I was curious and remember wanting to try for myself, but she wouldn´t let me. Looking back, I´m quite glad she woudln´t, it was her way of protecting me and making sure I was alright. I stuck to drinking, but since we only lasted for some weeks, the drinking never really got out of control. After that, I stopped drinking for a bit.

That´s how it continued to be. It never really got out of control as much as it did with Mary, I guess I grew up eventually. And in a way, I healed. I gained more confidence, and I suddenly didn´t feel like I needed to drink for people to like me, or in fact, wanted to drink at all.

I don´t know when I first thought about quitting drinking, I just let it fade out, until I slowly stopped. Not drinking anymore just felt right. I never had a huge moment of realization, a wake-up call that made me want to change my lifestyle or anything like that. There could´ve been a thousand wake up calls, but I was ignorant, I guess.

My last drink was a shot of Limoncello in January 2024 during a night of clubbing; this was a few days before dating my now ex-partner.

I still party a lot, plus I work at a bar so I have no problem being around alcohol and serving it to people. So even though I had phases of unhealthy drinking, I don´t think I was ever in danger of it becoming a serious problem. I still don´t feel like I could just have one drink, as soon as alcohol hits my system I don´t have any self-control. That´s why I just don´t drink anymore, and I feel good about it most days.

I´m proud to be sober, and I´m proud to tell people about it, I think in a way I made being sober part of my personality. Not in an annoying, I´m better than everyone else way, but more in a I´m happy to be confident enough to be sober in settings where almost no one is. At least I hope so, that isn´t really for me to tell.

I think people mistake sobriety for a boring life. I think my life is even more fun, I go out almost every weekend, and it might be the most fun I’ve ever had. Probably because first of all, I remember the fun, and because my nights don’t end up completely wasted in some place I wasn’t supposed to end up in. My nights now end up in my own bed, the room isn’t spinning when falling asleep and I don’t need a bowl next to my bed in case of throwing up. The next day, I might be tired but that’s all. No nausea, no headache, no I feel like I might die. That’s progress, and that’s great. Plus I didn’t sacrifice any fun for it.

I love clubbing sober and sensing my dancing body in the present moment, fully feeling like myself, and not like an intoxicated version of myself. I think the biggest problem was that back then, I liked that version of myself more than sober me.

I do feel lonely because of it sometimes. When my coworkers at the bar do shots together, I feel left out. Sometimes I fill a shot with water or some coke (the drink!) and while everyone knows I don´t drink, I feel a little better pretending to do shots.

I like me better now than I did back then. I´m proud of my sobriety, I really am. And while I´m all those things, I´m also ashamed to admit that I fucking miss drinking sometimes. I miss having drinks with my friends, fuck I even miss blacking out, even though I know it´s something I’m romanticizing. Waking up on a train in some other city next to Mary with no recall of the past hours feeling like I might die isn´t a situation I´d like to see myself in.

Life has gotten a lot more complicated since the breakup with my ex. And I would like a drink. In fact, I would love a drink. I think some Tequila would feel like coming home, which isn´t exactly a good thing for someone in desperate need of finding home. He used to be my home. But rationally, I know the temporary comfort of a drink wouldn´t fix me, it would do the opposite. I told Mary about it, and she still gets me. She´s the only person I can tell things like this to. There´s nothing she or anyone could say that would help me. But if I were to drink, I know she would understand me, which is a comforting thought.

I haven´t, I´m still sober, after all. As long as it´s only in my head it´s all good. It´s all good.

Other days, I think I just have to do it if it´s something I keep thinking about. Maybe I would have to get drunk once just to get it out of my system and move on. Because I know the moment I would be freezing on the cold bathroom tiles, my head resting on a toilet seat, my body on the verge of passing out, sobriety won´t sound that bad after all.

I mean, sobriety doesn´t sound bad, most days I´m very happy with my life the way it is. But like everything in life, it´s not always black and white, mostly it´s something blurry in between.

To be honest, I don´t think I´ll drink. Any time soon or ever. I don´t want hangovers, and don´t want to poison my body more than I already have. Not every desire I have needs to be acted on, therefore I´ll be sober, and I know deep down this is what I really want.