If I had to sum up my drug usage in college in one sentence, it would be that I’ve slowly replaced irresponsible drugs with responsible ones. During my first two years, I typified the newly-minted college student with newfound freedom and not enough responsibility to manage it. I would drink more than was good for me on the weekends, and I would use the hangover as an excuse to not do work the next day.

I was also introduced to weed in my first year, and smoking made me severely lazy during my second year. One of the reasons I’m not ashamed to write about this now is that I’ve done a lot to rectify my habits and be more responsible in both how I treat my body and how I manage my time.

The year off I took forced me to confront the realities of my drug habits. Spending time away from school made me appreciate it more as a balancing act between periods of concentrated productivity and relaxation that recharges you for the next round.

While this balance is different for different people, I personally cannot have one without the other. All work and no play will burn me out, but relaxing for too long makes me feel like a lazy, unproductive bum.

As an underclassman, I would simply ignore the negative feelings that accompanied too much laziness. Now, however, they become the fuel of study sessions and all-nighters that break my willpower to live instead of my willpower to work.

While thinking of school as a boxing match for your brain may be filled with metaphorical bruises and broken bones, I keep doing my work in the hopes that what doesn’t kill you really does make you stronger.

Now that I’ve got the first half of my third year under my belt, I can see a marked difference in my drug habits. I haven’t smoked weed in almost a year, and my drinking has been relegated to the weekends when I don’t have a lot of assignments or tests coming up.

During the week, caffeine in the form of coffee and/or Red Bull keeps me in the zone and concentrated on work. My tolerance for caffeine has gone up to the point that it takes roughly twice as much to produce the same effect.

Despite my aversion to being slightly dependent on stimulants to be productive, I would take it over my former habitual laziness any day. When I look at where I am in school now versus before, I feel vindicated by my choice of substances to “abuse.” If I could talk to my underclassman self, I’d probably slap him in the face with my GPA and a cup of coffee.

Growing up, I never thought of myself as someone who would need drugs to do work or have fun, but I was also naïve to the world in a lot of ways. Now that I have the benefit of albeit limited worldly experience, I’ve come to the conclusion that drugs aren’t strictly necessary to either do work or have fun, but they do enhance the experience of life when used responsibly.