When you ask someone about their time as a student, the most inevitable answer would probably be something along the lines of ‘the best nights of my life’ or a funny anecdote related to being absolutely battered or [insert another adjective for the state of inebriation]. After taking a gap year, and managing to use fake I.D. for at least two years before reaching my legal age to consume alcohol, I was fully expecting this prior to coming to Leeds. I had the best fresher’s year I can imagine, and certainly do have many amusing anecdotes from being drunk, some of which include videos of me on the corridor floor crying ‘I wanna party!’ and, my personal favourite, falling asleep on the sofa in Revolutions on a Barbie girl Carnage night out, only to be woken up three hours later by the bar staff who wanted to lock up as it was closing time.
All these fun (yet somewhat cringe-worthy) times aside, I am in my second year now and have recently made the decision not to drink anymore. This is my decision, and I made it in an effort to be healthier, lose weight and hopefully have more money! So far, two out of the three reasons are justifiable: I feel like I have more energy and I’ve lost six pounds, but I don’t seem to have any more money, although that’s because I spend it on Pink Lady apples which are more expensive than Sainsbury’s basics gin.
Most of my friends who I live with know I’m on a diet, and know my happiness at how much I’ve lost in two weeks. I think that’s probably why they are accepting of my decision to cut back on the happy juice, but before I’d ‘officially’ started my diet this was a different story. I’d been secretly trying to stop drinking on account of health benefits for a while, but when I told my friends that I ‘maybe might not drink anymore,’ I was met with scoffing, those wrinkled faces that you know mean they don’t agree with something, and told that I was being ‘boring.’ Well, I’m sorry if my sober self is not entertaining enough for us to be friends at night without alcohol. Before Uni, I would quite regularly go out without drinking because I would be the designated driver, and still ‘managed’ to have really good nights and, more often than not, last later than those who’d had about 7 pints of Dutch courage. This leads me to beg the question: ‘do my friends only think you can have a good time when you’re drunk?’
It seems that way in the eyes of my sports team. Every event we go to, we have drinking races with funnels of alcohol shoved down our necks: it’s basically a requirement if you want to be friends with ‘the cool people.’ I know team members who didn’t drink even in first year and somehow, despite their skill in the sport, they seem to be somewhat ‘separate’ from the fun of it all. So, the last time I went to an event, I had already told my friends at home that I was cutting back in aid of my diet, and that was all fine. I’d even been to parties without drinking and no-one said I was boring! (Super score!) But, on the sports team, I found myself making excuses for why I didn’t want to buy a drink at the bar which ranged from illness to doctor’s orders to being hung-over. However, I was simply told to man up and get a drink so eventually I buckled and bought a single vodka and diet coke. This was the only alcohol I had that day, but I still found myself pretending that the big bottle of Fanta I had bought had vodka in, and when people gave me their drinks, I would oblige them but not actually drink any. This makes me sad; how is it that I could be so ashamed of my own decision, one that I have made for my own benefits, and just pretend to be drunk in order to ‘fit in.’ I’ll tell you why: peer pressure.
If you’re constantly confronted with comments like ‘you used to be fun’ or perpetually reminded that you’re boring for not taking a drug that causes more deaths a year than ecstasy, I don’t blame anyone for caving to that pressure. Having experienced the social sides of a sports team however, I couldn’t shake the feeling that ours was quite tame. We at least didn’t have to go through one of the most notorious losses of dignity that happens at university sports level, that infamous initiation.
Now I’ve only heard rumours about initiations, but from following a few of them up I’ve found that they’re usually true. I’m told that there is a nominated ‘fresher slut’ that is auctioned off to a lucky guy that then has to take care of a paralytic, scantily clad girl for the evening. There is a box to be sick in collectively, which then has to be eaten through to find a ‘golden ticket’ for your place on the team. Drinking piss through a funnel, drinking through a rotting fish, drinking through a pigs head, and even the choice between shaving all the hair on your body or downing a litre of vodka; these are just a minor few in the theatre of cruelty performed at university . These are all fine and well if you A: drink and B: have no dignity left from wetting yourself an hour earlier during the centurion you were forced to do. But what happens if all you want to do is join a sports team, and you don’t drink, for whatever reason? Do it sober? I would hope that any respectable team captain would just let someone in based on their physical abilities to play, rather than to consume. Unfortunately, I will never know.
So in response to anyone who’s ever said anything even remotely abusive to me or to you or to anyone who has tried to give up drinking for any reason, I say ignore them. Do what you want without worrying about what people think.