I was a house party kind of person. Some people love bars, and other people could spend hours in the club—but for me, I loved house parties. There was something fun about anxiously awaiting the weekend, praying for a good party to ‘tequila shot’ your troubles away. You could yell and dance and socialize with people that made you laugh. You would wake up the next morning and laugh over who you drunk-texted. I did it, and looking back now, I’m entirely less proud of my beer pong championships than I was at the time of the victory.
I never thought that I would cringe looking back at memories of those days. After all, they were fun: the memories are all a little fonder because I don’t remember a large majority of them. I even assumed that going to college would only perpetuate the cycle—that’s what college kids do, anyways. They go to bars and they slosh around and they laugh about it the next morning. That’s the image that my friends had given me, and I was looking forward to it.
But I learned very quickly into my college career that this was not the direction that I had anticipated that it would be. When you imagine it all, you tend to forget the morning after, the phone calls that you made while swimming in mouthfuls of vodka. You forget the aftertaste and the embarrassing things that you said and the time that you cried in the corner for reasons that you aren’t exactly sure of. You forget all the bad things. You forget that they were mostly bad things.
Suddenly, I was seeing these days in a much different light—a light much darker than I had remembered. I didn’t want to spend every weekend dancing on the verge of dressing up, almost throwing up, and actually throwing up all over my bathroom. I saw the people that I had grown up around slowly losing pieces that I loved about them in their new, constant surroundings. For them, Thursday nights were about frat parties and mini-skirts, but for me, it had become more about becoming a person that I enjoyed on sober days. Their entire lives revolved around the party and the aftermath. I knew that I didn’t want an existence that shallow.
They tell you that college is where you become the person that you’re going to be, and I feared what I would become if I let these years get the better of me. I wanted more depth—I wanted something that gave me a reason to get up in the morning, and not something that just made me want to go back to sleep. I didn’t want to look back on my college years and imagine a blur of flashing lights and red solo cups. I want something more.
Do I regret that time in my life? No. Do I look down on those that choose a different life than I did? Not at all. Am I a nun that has committed her entirely life to abstaining from alcohol? Nope.
I loved house parties. House parties were my thing. But the greatest thing about the house party era of my life is that it was just that—an era. For me, there was a time to be young and dumb, and I’m grateful that that time has passed. I want to be able to look back on my college years and see a time that makes me smile- a time that I can remember.
