Growing up in a small town community, there was very little to do each weekend. The typical thing to do was to go to a Friday night football game, then crash at your best friend’s house for the rest of the weekend. I was raised understanding the effects of alcohol, but unlike my peers, I had never tried any. The reason was not simply that I didn’t want to try it or couldn’t because I was underage, but living with a chronic liver disorder prevented me from experimenting. As I continued to get closer to the end of high school and the beginning of college, I would talk to my doctor about what I could and couldn’t do and the answer was always the same: if I drank, my liver would fail and I’d be risking my life.
The next question that everybody, for the entirety of my senior year high school, asked me was, “what are you going to do when everyone’s drinking at college?” I would laugh and shrug it off, thinking that what other people did with their lives wouldn’t affect me. For the most part, that was how I had always thought, so why would other people’s ability to drink affect me in any way? I didn’t think it would, and I told myself, it’s college. This is what people do on the weekends, you can handle it.
In the fall, following graduation, I began my four-year journey at UNH. I didn’t focus on the fact that it’s a huge school with an even bigger party scene. I told myself that I would go out every weekend, just like the people around me; just like my girlfriends down the hall; just like the cute boy living next to my dorm room. I did it; I ran around in the snippy fall air in a tank top and tight jeans. I went to every pregame, every party, walked from frat house to frat house until my feet hurt and the girls I was with were so drunk, they were screaming how much they loved one another in different languages. I took it all in, and for a short moment, I loved it. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t drinking because I could tell that guy in the corner that I didn’t want a drink, and yes, I would love to play pong. My friends acted as if I wasn’t any different than them and I came out of each party thinking that I could handle the sweaty, overcrowded rooms we danced in for maybe a total of forty-five minutes before moving onto the next house. I allowed myself to believe that the weekends were no different for me than they were for the people on this campus who could—and did—get drunk every weekend. I still made the treks to Wildkitty every Friday and/or Saturday night, depending on how many waffle fries my friends wanted to consume. Eventually, I would crawl back into my bed at the end of the night, simply happy that I would be the only one not waking up with a killer hangover the next morning, and to me, that was the only difference.
The façade only lasted for so long, however, when I began to notice my role in my group of friends change. Was I really no different than them, or was I simply the mom, constantly checking in with everyone to see how they were doing, where they were going, and if they needed to go home. I noticed that until the moment I knew everyone was safe, in their rooms, slipped into their pajamas, I was completely on edge, making sure everyone was safe and having a good time. I noticed that I was not having a good time, and I started to withdraw from my friends because of it. I realized that I was different because of my disorder, and therefore, my college experience—and weekends—would be different too.
People who can’t or choose not to drink are somewhat rare on a campus like UNH. Not drinking, or drinking, doesn’t define a person but it is a part of them. For a long time, I felt lame for not drinking because I watched my friends all drink every weekend and felt like they were having a better time than me. I quickly learned, however, that that’s not always the case and there’s no reason I should be ashamed for not participating in the typical college activity. Raging may be someone else’s scene but it’s not mine, yet both are OK. The point to college is that there is no specific answer on “how to college.” We’re all here to have a good time, sober or otherwise.
