Entering college, I was excited for a lot of things. Meeting new people, taking classes I actually want to take, having more freedoms, and most of all, the parties! Everything they show us in the movies about college parties and meeting people and fun drinking games always looked so fun. It didn’t take me very many "weekends out" to realize that the movies don’t show you everything, and this scene was not for me.

Getting ready to go out on a Friday night is a long process. Honestly, in the few times I have done it, I’m exhausted before I even get out the door. Then there’s the walk to the party… FOUR blocks?! Is that even worth it? But you do it anyway because why even go to college if you’re not going to party every single weekend, am I right?

So we finally get there and walking in I honestly feel like I am walking into a zoo. I’m surrounded by the sweaty arm-flailing that our generation likes to call dancing, BLARING music, and drunk girls throwing themselves at guys who are also too drunk to notice. Walking through to the basement all I smell is cheap beer and desperation.

I’m standing there holding an empty solo cup pretending to drink it while scanning the room for anyone that seems remotely interesting. People are stumbling around from one corner of the room to another, passing out on the couch, throwing up in the bathroom, and all I can think about is how sad this all is. How desperate and pathetic it all looks.

I mean really, this is what we call a good time these days? No one here is having a good time. In fact, half of these people will not even remember this all in the morning. We so desperately want attention that we try to out-drink the person next to us every single weekend, resulting in nothing but regret and a killer headache.

You have to go out every weekend and publicly humiliate yourself just to feel like you are having the proper “college experience.” It’s a joke. It is such a joke and quite frankly, it's getting old.

How pathetic are we that the only memories we have of certain nights are in the form of a Snapchat story or an Instagram post? Not to mention the people who seemingly go out not to actually have fun, but just to take a lot of pictures to convince all of their high school friends that they are having a better time at college than everyone else.

Being a college student is not an excuse to get blacked out every single weekend.

It's just not. Going out with friends and having a few drinks is one thing but when you're chugging water bottles full of the cheapest liquor you can get your hands on, there is a problem. This is not a normal thing that anyone should be doing, so why is it that it has become the norm?

Anywhere else in the world, binge drinking is considered alcoholism, but for some reason when you step on a college campus it becomes just “having a good time.” Drinking is done excessively and often paired with even more dangerous things like Xanax or Adderall. People seem confused when you don’t want to get blacked out with them as if the concept of having fun sober, or even just slightly drunk, is a foreign concept. You either go hard or go home, and at the risk of losing touch with a handful of friends, I chose to go home.

Every once in a while I still go out with close friends that I know are not going to act ridiculous and that I know I can have fun with no matter what. I am in no way shaming all party-goers or saying it is stupid to go out at all. What I am shaming is binge drinking multiple nights a week and being naïve enough to think that it is less dangerous just because you are in college. Everyone in convinced that somehow at this time in your life you are indestructible and nothing bad could possibly come from the decisions you make.

Planning to black out before you even go out is a horrible idea. There is nothing cute about not knowing where you are or how you got there in the morning. Binge drinking and pushing people far past the limits that their body can handle needs to stop being glorified everywhere and stop being so openly accepted by everyone.

Leaving college with only blurry memories of nights you spent on the bathroom floor of a frat house are not going to make you proud of the four years and thousands of dollars you spent in college. Instead of “get wasted every weekend,” your goal should be to make actual fulfilling memories that are going to last longer than those 10 shots of vodka you took the other night.