Let’s set the scene: it’s Halloween freshman year, the eve of one of my beloved friend’s birthdays. The motley crew all clad in our Walmart-chic costumes trolled the party scene together, had one too many drinks, maybe made a few mistakes in the romance department, busted quite a few moves, and successfully wreaked our special kind of havoc on the downtown Lewisburg area. When the night came to a close, the birthday girl plopped down on her bed in her sweat and beer covered costume just as the clock stroke midnight, held up two fingers and spoke the now infamous phrase: “I hate myself but I love the party.” From that moment onwards, that phrase came to be the anthem of our college years.
As I have gone along through my time at Bucknell laughing as I say this phrase with my friends, I now realize that its comedy comes from the irrevocable truth behind it. At Bucknell, we always say that we work hard and party harder. As we bust our butts studying, working, and surviving on this campus, our reward is not a proper night’s sleep, a good meal, or something relatively “healthy,” but rather a night out with our friends. But as much as we love the party, does the party love us back? Based off of all of the bad decisions I have made and watched my friends make, with repercussions or without, I would argue that the party does not have a whole lot of love to give back to us. And still we continue throughout these four years existing as zombies, sleep deprived, sick, and overworked, sacrificing our well-being for the sake of the party. The truth is, we are putting the love of the party before ourselves.
More than we realize it, there are great consequences to this “I hate myself but I love the party” lifestyle. Not only does living for the party harm us physically with a lack of sleep and poor immune system, but hating ourselves doesn’t do much for our personal identities. But why does loving the party consequently mean hating ourselves? All the mistakes we make, the drunken texts, the late night eating, the things we say, some of the dance moves we break out, are things that we regret to some degree, but feel we have to accept because they happened all in the pursuit of the party. But truth be told, when looking for a good time, sometimes we don’t actually have a good time. All of the not so great things that may have happened and that feeling of self-loathing for the mistakes we made and are not as easily shrugged off as we think. There is a lack of control over who we are in this party culture. We let ourselves go and make decisions that we wouldn’t normally make, and even though we are supposed to shrug them off, how do we really feel about ourselves the next morning? I know I don’t feel quite like a star. We’ve got to take a step back to look at our lifestyle and decide if the party is really worth hating ourselves over.
With party culture being such a huge part of college life, it is unrealistic to assume that we would be willing to drop it altogether. So then we must ask the question, is it actually possible to love the party and ourselves? The key to loving yourself in spite of the party isn’t as simple as embracing all the mistakes you make. We have to take back a bit of that control and make sure that the mistakes we make still reflect the people we want to be. Taking back control also means being a bit more responsible when we decide to go out and drink. Knowing our limits and drinking responsibly will help ensure that we don’t make some of those regrettable decisions that leave us hating ourselves in the first place.
We cannot let the pursuit of the party derail our lives. There has to be a balance, but not necessarily between studying and partying. We don’t give ourselves enough time between working hard and partying harder to actually take care of ourselves. If we take just a little bit of the time and effort that we put into loving the party into respecting ourselves, we might in fact be able to love the party and ourselves simultaneously.
While I would never be able to completely give up the beloved and telling phrase “I hate myself but I love the party,” I now understand that “I hate myself” shouldn’t be such a large part of my weekend vocabulary. Even though I don’t actually hate myself, I realize that even saying it can be a blow to the good old sense of self. But with taking the time to pause and reflect on who we are right now in our college careers, maybe one day you will hear me saying “I love this party and I freaking love myself.”