Why drinking after college will make you no more or less of an alcoholic … hopefully

Pint of beer
The bottom of a pint of beer... mostly backwash. Photo by Jordan Anderson/The Siskiyou.

If you drink like I do, you’ve probably heard the phrase, “Enjoy it while you can, because after college, it’s called alcoholism.”

Well, I have a few words for whoever coined this cute — and completely inaccurate— phrase.

Being in college and drinking are synonymous for many, myself included. Since I came to this school, I learned a whole new meaning for the weekend.

I love drinking. For a naturally shy person like myself, it has brought a new world of opportunities. Drunken bonds become sober friendships, and even relationships. Just because something began stumbling or slurring, or just because you couldn’t remember most of the night, doesn’t mean that what took place didn’t have value.

I can say, without hesitation, that drinking has brought me closer to the ever close friends I have.

So while showing up hungover to work after a night of beer pong or flip cup will grow immature as you age, ending college doesn’t mean you have to grow-up quite yet. I know plenty of people, years older than my 21-year-old self, who could use a few lessons in maturity when it comes to drinking.

I believe that a partying lifestyle is something a person should let naturally run its course, and that rushing it will prove harmful.

If I graduated this June, as I will, and completely cut out my crazy partying for the sake of my college-educated maturity, I would fiend.

Without getting partying out of my system, I think it would catch up to me later.

I already feel myself growing out of it naturally, and however long that takes, I’m happily willing to wait, and have plenty of fun while I do.

I will eat my words if I’m still drinking at 30 the way I am now. My stomach already can’t handle what it could when I was a freshman.

Drinking after I graduate, and partying with my friends even though I won’t be enrolled in any more classes doesn’t give me a dependence, or an addiction, and I am far from being an alcoholic.

But all that aside—I turned 21 in November, and I’m just getting started.

 

 

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