What You Lose Being Sober In Your 20s
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Before I moved to the city for college, I didn’t know it was possible to fall in love with a city. On trips down memory lane, I romanticize my years living there as the 2018 summer hit Crazy Rich Asians starring the beautifully articulate Constance Wu. In reality, it was more of an East Asian version of The Great Gatsby. You know, the movie rendition where a depressed Carraway narrates the story to his shrink.
What started out exhilarating and exploratory turned out to just thinly veil the darker battles I was facing as a struggling college student in a big city. While I knew my social media reel was just a highlight reel of my life, friends who I went to school with thought I was having the time of my life. My Snapchat stories were full of glow parties, rooftop bars, and invite only events. But like many teenage girls, I was hyper-insecure. Insecure of my looks, compared to girls who were naturally tall, thin and curvaceous in all the right places. Insecure of my family’s wealth, compared to that of the families of the sons and daughters of business magnates who would throw the glitziest parties I’ve ever seen in my life. Insecure of my decision to move to Hong Kong, feeling like I had something to prove to people from my small, suburban hometown. Each year, I grew more tired of having the same, random conversations with strangers in front of Club 711. Each big party become more and more like putting on a show for people who had never spent time with me sober.
Prior to my self-imposed abstinence, I hit the club on average once a week. Once a week actually isn’t a lot of drinking, if you compare it to how much society thinks people drink based off of Betches memes alone. Realistically though, the average American drinks 0.14 drinks per week. And for my genetic makeup, even that amount of alcohol was incredibly toxic. According to Vox, (confirmed by my Color test results lately!) I’m one of the 43% of Chinese Americans that get Asian flush, which means my body lacks the ALDH2 enzyme that breaks down ethanol (alcohol) into a non-toxic substance that my body can absorb. To make matters even worse, people who can’t break down ethanol are at a high risk of developing esophageal cancer if they continue to drink regularly.
Yet, even with all the readily available health information that thoroughly supported my decision to abstain, cutting alcohol out of my lifestyle was so hard. Drinking is a habit deeply rooted in many cultures as a fun past-time. Moreover, in greater China, going out to drink with colleagues is part of playing the great game of business. I had this strange anxiety that sitting out on happy hour meant that other people would advance up the corporate ladder faster than I would. When I finally did stop hard drinking for good, I did lose some friends. I also lost a lot of baggage I had been carrying around with me since I moved to the city:
- A jacked up sleep schedule
The first thing that happened was starting to sleep at a humane hour. I was able to wake up in time for breakfast, a rare feat, on a good night out (I had a 5% attendance rate at my dining hall’s breakfast window.) No amount of braised brisket instant noodle or warm breakfast macaroni could entice my hungover and exhausted self to get out of bed. I used to have FOMO about going out, and now I have FOMO about missing breakfast.
2. Flaky friends
I don’t know why I felt comfortable calling people I bumped into weekly in front of Club 711 my “friends”, despite having never done anything to build trust other than play hardball drinking games together. Maybe because proximity, vulnerability, and consistency are key ingredients for close friendships, and meeting drunk in front of a 711 time after time narrowly fits the bill. A drunken man’s words are a sober man’s thoughts…I guess that’s vulnerable, in a way?
3. Unhealthy coping mechanisms
Without a scapegoat for making reckless decisions, I began to invest my time in hobbies that helped me destress from days filled with academia. The University of Hong Kong prides itself on being the cream of the crop of Asia’s most academic. So, it was common to only have two hobbies, really: studying and crying in the library about studying. I’m proud to say that I’ve now returned to biking regularly and working out with a group of women I consider my South Bay sisters.
Of course, there are days that I miss my early college days. Not because of the heavy drinking, but because our energy to discover ourselves and the world was so palpable, the sleepless nights so thrilling, and the conversations, more often than not, so vulnerable. The ironic thing is that I remember it was fun, but I can’t quite remember what was so fun about it because I was too intoxicated. I’m really not sure why blacking out and hooking up from drinking too much is such a highly valorized activity—there are so many more difficult things to achieve in life that deserve recognition. Here’s to making sober memories in my early 20s that I’ll actually remember for life. Oh, but I did meet Darius from Roche and I’m still such a sucker for french house.
💌 Kait is listening to working on the weekend, like usual
