The above title is a lyric from a popular song. I remember listening to this quirky song (What’s My Age Again By Blink-182) when I was like…wow, I guess 12 or 13 (back when MTV actually played music videos) thinking that it’d be a pretty long time before I could actually relate, but well, here I am, about 10 years later…23 years old.
Through signing on facebook occasionally, I notice the “party of the weekend” is forever plastered in dozens of photo albums from the same groups of people that post these types of photos every week. Every week it’s the same thing, total and absolute intoxication for the entire world to see and I could careless because broadcasting your drunken weekend to the world hardly impresses me.
But there was a time not too long ago, where I found myself at the “hottest” party every Friday and Saturday, drinking myself into near comas with my favorite group of friends. There are hundreds of facebook photos floating around somewhere, with our koolaide smiles and glazed over eyes. No, nobody ever died, it was all in good fun and something for us to do (because we were probably too stupid to crack open a book).
Now that I’m older, I have bills to pay. I have responsibilities, a job and graduate school to worry about. Perhaps I’ve gotten a bit boring and predictable, but my priorities definitely have shifted and I am solely responsible for myself and my actions. My family can no longer be blamed for my epic failures as a person. No longer am I “anonymous” in this town, but now my name serves a purpose. I’m a “professional” now. No longer do I desire to go to these types of “freshman” parties. I went to one or two last semester, mainly to DD for my roommates, (who are still in their undergrad), but the parties are not the same to me anymore. I actually found myself feeling out of place, even though a good portion of the people there, were the same people throwing these parties when I was just 19. ..They’ve got to be pushing 25 and 26 by now.
A funny thing happens when you get older. Your priorities shift and change for the better. I’ve been “legal” for sometime now, and drinking until I can’t feel hasn’t crossed my mind in ages and why should it? I can legally drink in public and not get in trouble, there’s no need to “over do it”. I can take my time and not have to worry about cops (unless of course I decide to drive). When I was 19 that was part of the adventure. Drinking openly in public, knowing goodness well I had no business doing so. It was something I never thought about doing back home (because I actually respected my parents and our home and so did my friends I grew up with), and something that only happened here, and occasionally at friend’s apartments in other college towns when we’d come to visit. It’s flat out ridiculous to think we’d drive for hours just to crash at a friend’s place to drown ourselves in alcohol and fast food all weekend. One of my best friend’s at the time (my current roommate) and I would base our lives around these weekends. Looking back on it, we did some extremely outrageous things (trespassing onto the football stadium, urinating off of a bridge, jumping fences to run from the cops, stumbling around in the night holding each other up because we were to drunk to go at it alone), but always made sure that one of us stayed sober, in case one of us stopped breathing…
It’s not just my mentality about drinking that has changed, but my overall mind-set as well. I’ve grown-up. I find myself losing interest in the people that I once hung around day in and day out for months on end, because they have yet to grow-up. We were inseparable. They just don’t excite me as they once did. They seem dead to me now, like lifeless skeletons in my past, only a distant memory through goofy photos or facebook messages. I hardly speak to these people, partly by choice, and partly by circumstance. I am removed from their world as they are from mine. We had good times (and some not so great times), but those times were in the past. These now 2-D people have been replaced by more sophisticated and intelligent people in my major and program, or lifelong friends from high school, who have grown up with me through it all. No, I don’t hate them, we just have nothing in common these days and I’ve grown bored with yesterday. I’ve surrounded myself by graduate students/alumni mainly because they can relate to me at this point in my life. They know how it feels to be an adult and have twenty-million things going on in your life on a daily basis. They know how it feels to have real world stresses, anxieties and concerns (outside of getting drunk). My roommate can no longer relate to me because he is in a different stage in his life, therefore we really have nothing to talk about these days besides the weather. He doesn’t get my life (yet), and I get his, I’m just moving forward. Our lives are returning to their parallel states, as they did before we met in college. It’s funny to think of all the stages our friendship went through, to end up right where we began. Everything changes when you walk across that stage, get a job, and mommy and daddy stop paying for everything. It wakes you up and reality places a choke hold on you. It breaks you. He’ll find that out sooner or later. Hopefully he’s prepared, because it aint gonna be pretty. I warned him.
I’ve also gotten a better grasp on what really matters to me and what doesn’t. What upsets me and what doesn’t, who I can trust and who I can’t and I have to say that I’m getting fairly good at knowing these things from the start.
I’m real. I’ve never believed in being fake in social situations. There’s no need for me to apologize to anyone for who I am and what I’ve come to be. It’s not worth it. If you can’t even be real to other people (such as your friends), how are you going to be real to yourself? As mean as it sounds, I’m generally up front about how I feel about certain situations and people. There’s no need to hide that. If I’m open enough to feel that, there’s probably a good enough reason why. It’s not that I go around hating people on purpose; it really does take a lot to get me to that point. I like to live by the motto, “everyone is innocent until proven guilty.” Some people prove that statement to be real from the get go, others epically lose my trust upon introduction.
I’m learning to be more selfish. In the past, I’ve done everything for everybody that I possibly could, only making myself very unhappy. I’ve learned that as the years fly by, some people are inconsolable and will never be happy regardless of what you do for them. Some people in my life actually were selfish enough not to care that they were straining my emotions and continued to do so anyway. From now on, I have to focus on making myself happy too. I have to do things for me, as well as others in my life. I have to keep in mind that I matter as well.
I’m learning that laughing everyday does ease the pain. No matter how stressed out I get, I have to make time to laugh and smile. I also have to make time to cry. Crying in my mind is not necessarily a sign of weakness, but a sign of letting go of pent up emotion. It’s liberating in a weird way. I rarely have the urge to physically cry and maybe that’s my been my problem all along.
Hopefully by this time next year, I’ll look back on this and laugh at how naive I was at 23, because now at 23, I’m looking back on 22, 21, 20, 19 and so on, wondering how I made it through the ridiculous string of bullshit that I did.
jelainesays
