As a college student, the difference between sobriety and full on alcoholic is very blurry. Sometimes it feels like there are only two options when going out. You can either go sober and commit to not having any drinks at all or let yourself go completely and wake up with a nasty hangover. It doesn’t have to be this way for everyone. Your journey with alcohol is entirely up to you and how you want to feel about yourself at the end of the night.
Judgment is a huge part of college drinking culture. People can judge you for not drinking, drinking too much, how you act when drinking, etc. The list can go on forever. Those programs in middle school scare us into not taking prescription pills and smoking weed, but they didn’t prepare or teach us how to drink responsibly. I can remember learning the standard drink size and not to mix different types of liquor, but why wasn’t I taught that alcohol was a depressant and can make anxiety worse? I learned this the hard way during my first semester at UConn. I had some drinking experience before coming to college, but never on a weekly basis. My feelings of homesickness, stress, and overall depression were amplified every weekend and lasted into the week. The effects wore off by Thursday or Friday, and then I felt healthy and excited to go out again. A lot of college students fall into this same cycle.
This summer, my TikTok page was full of videos about non-alcohol drinks and people sharing their experiences being sober as a young adult either living in college or a big city like NYC. I interacted with these videos and per the algorithm, the app served up more and more content. I learned about how alcohol can affect your mental health and I realized the mistakes I made in my first year. If I was already having a hard time adjusting, what made me think getting drunk every weekend would help?
Three months into sophomore year, I can proudly say most of my nights out have been spent socializing with friends, dancing to my favorite songs, and either not drinking at all or only having one for the entire night. This process allows me to manage my mental health and still be part of the general “partying” culture. I’m able to have fun on the weekends and wake up in the morning without my self-esteem in the gutter. I can go on a walk, get homework done, and have a productive day instead of rotting in bed like I used to.
I also learned that you shouldn’t have to explain your drinking choices to anyone but yourself. Who says you need to drink heavily because you’re in college? College is so much more than that. Surround yourself with friends who you genuinely have fun with and who respect your decisions no matter what. The lessons you learn and the connections you make are what you’re going to want to remember in 20 years, not the time you threw up in the back of the bar at 8:30 pm (definitely not taken from personal experience).