DOSE:

Alcohol

BODY WEIGHT:

110 lb

From the time I was 18 years old, the summer before college (1996) changed my life forever. I started drinking with my friends at music concerts, on vacation, on the weekends, and then that turned into going out all the time and drinking to deal with money problems, family problems, school problems, etc.

I didn't realize it at the time because I thought I was having a good time, but looking back I would have been more focused about school if I'd have cleared my head and thought about the consequences of my actions.

Nobody was killed from alcohol poisoning, no DUI's, nothing like that, but there were so many times that I did drive around after I'd gone out for a night of binge drinking. Needless to say, I am extremely LUCKY and will never do that stuff again.

I never needed to go out and get drunk, I didn't feel better while I was doing it, but it was just something that people my age did, one after the other all night long. It seemed fun at the time, but as I got older, people were finishing school and getting on with their lives, and I was still hanging out and doing nothing, looking forward to another semester of taking the last semester's classes over because I got bad grades.

So, when the money was out, I started working full time, money was rolling in, and I couldn't go out drinking anymore or I'd screw up my only source of income. Then I realized that was it, I couldn't drink until the weekend, and I could afford school and was conscious of my work.

After one year of working full time, I got back into school full time, got all A's and only drink a few drinks once in a rare while. The only thing is that sometimes I look back and wish I would have realized how nice it is to enjoy life without drinking. Too bad I feel like an ass every time I go to my old college for football games and feel like I wonder who remembers me from way back when. I know for sure that I acted like a retard quite often because I was out getting wasted.

Now things are different, and I actually did well enough to get into graduate school, but this time, school will be alot different. Maybe those things won't come back to haunt me. Thankfully I never got arrested or anything!

Exp Year: 1996	ExpID: 31563
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Dec 5, 2007	Views: 11,473
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Alcohol (61) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Not Applicable (38)