Ps. You Don’t Have To Drink If You Don’t Want To
15.11.20
I realise that shouldn’t be a revelatory statement. And in a lot of ways, it’s not. But every year, around this time, it’s a statement worth repeating. Because we live in New Zealand, people! A country so rife in drinking culture that it’s weirder to be sober than it is to be tits deep in your own vomit from drinking half a 20-ounce of Smirnoff.
I don’t really drink. Not much, anyway. I probably drink five or six times a year. So I guess you could call me an “occasional drinker”? Except, instead of being the kind of person who reserves alcohol for special occasions like birthdays or engagement parties or promotions, I tend to do the opposite. Because if it’s a special occasion, I want to soak up everything. In the immortal words of Aerosmith: I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing.
I don’t have an exciting or devastating or even remotely interesting story as to why I’m not a big drinker. I’m just not that into it? Not particularly fond of the taste, and not particularly jazzed by the feeling. See! Boring. So boring, in fact, that despite being asked countless times to write about “why I’m mostly sober”, I’ve never bothered to because it would genuinely be the most nap-inducing article to grace these digital pages. Like, be honest: How sleepy are you right now?
I often think I’d quite like to be the kind of girl who curls up on the couch after a long, hard day at work with a glass of red. In fact I’d happily settle for being the kind of girl who can get away with saying “a glass of red”. I’ve never said “a glass of red”, with reference to myself, in a non-ironic way, in my life.
But as we approach the end of the year – summer parties and Christmas and New Year’s Eve – we’ll all find ourselves immersed in more alcohol-adjacent situations. And so, I guess I just wanted to remind you that, if by chance you find yourself *not wanting* to order a glass of rosè or a negroni or a G&T on a night out, you don’t have to (!). I am hereby giving you permission to go to the bar and ask for a goddamn soda with a slice of lime. If you’re feeling up to it, you can tell friends you’re sober tonight, and if you’re not you can simply lie and say there’s vodka in the glass and they’ll be none the wise.
Because, in my experience, intoxicated people don’t tend to register sober people as being sober. When I’m drinking, I don’t have a “radar” for who’s sober. In fact I don’t have a radar for most things when I’m drinking. So even though you’re worried you’ll spend your whole night explaining yourself – I can assure you, you won’t. And more importantly, no one gives a fuck. As Ethel Barrett once said, “We would worry far less about what others think of us if we realized how seldom they do.”