Here’s an older post that I wrote. I still think of the girl that we saw, especially as my own daughter gets older.
My husband pulled the car to the curb so that the kids and I could hop out of our mini van instead of having to walk to the patio where we were meeting friends for a night out. I could hear the music already playing and I was so pumped for the singer, a 16 year old girl who used to babysit our kids. She was covering Taylor Swift or Kelly Clarkson and I felt my heart skip a beat with excitement for finally being out of the house.
As I helped my daughter out of the car a man and woman came walking behind us. They were exiting a nearby brewery. The woman could barely walk and the man who was holding her up was struggling to keep moving forward. The woman was so young. Maybe not even 21, but then again I’m older now so everyone younger than 40 looks like a child. She was talking gibberish and her clothes were all wrinkled. She had her purse around her shoulder but it was falling down. She nearly fell right into our van as the kids were staring with fear.
“You guys okay?” I asked knowing already that they were not.
“FHDKDDHAFDKDD,” the girl said as they kept moving past.
My daughter gripped my hand and I could tell that she was worried.
“Are you wondering what’s wrong with her?” I asked.
She nodded at me confused that I hadn’t called 911 and wondering why I wasn’t doing more to help this sick woman.
“She’s been poisoned by alcohol,” I explained.
“When you drink too much alcohol (which has poison in it) it makes you unable to walk and talk and it can make you really sick.”
My daughter gave me an understanding nod as the woman faded into the distance. It made perfect sense to her that poisoning was the only logical solution for this poor woman’s bizarre behavior.
We went into the restaurant, listened to music, ordered Ale 8’s and ginger beer and had a blast. But I couldn’t shake the image of the girl. I kept thinking about all the bad the things that could happen to her. Thoughts like, God, I hope she wasn’t planning to drive. Did she know that guy she was with? Was she going to make it home? Poor thing is going to feel so sick……flooded my mind as I thought about the times that I had been in her situation.
I was once her. Well, not just once, many times I stumbled my way out of a bar and into all kinds of shady situations that left me feeling ashamed. I was young then, and it seemed like most everyone I knew got really drunk and woke up the next day telling stories or their wild night. No one ever addressed with me how dangerous it was to not be able to walk or the harm that the chemicals in the alcohol were causing to my body. Time and time again I thought throwing up and a throbbing head was just part of having “fun.”
I can’t stop thinking about her.
I wonder if she’s recovered by now? Is the hangxiety still lingering like it did for me? Does she still have an ache in her foot that she can’t explain or a scrape on her knee from falling down like I once did? Has she been able to process her feelings? Is she okay with what happened or is she burying her regret deep deep down so that she doesn’t have to think about it ever again? How long, if ever, will it take her to realize that the reason she got like that is because she drank a poison that is normalized as being “fun” when in fact, it could have killed her. She could have walked into oncoming traffic, driven her car off the road, choked on her own vomit, or slowly but surely unlocked an addiction that could damage her insides like the thousands of other people that die from drinking every day.
I hope she’s okay. I hope it was a one time thing and she will keep her vow to never get like that again. I hope she recovers and moves on and finds other ways to have fun that don’t involve complete impairment of her legs. I hope she realizes there’s so much more to this life. I hope she gets pissed off at how she was duped by alcohol and makes a big stink of it so that others’ don’t make the same mistake.
Most of all, I hope she forgives herself.
No one ever plans to get that wasted. I’m sure she intended to walk out of that bar with the proper use of her legs. There were so many factors that put her in that position. The rate at which her body metabolizes the alcohol, her size, her diet, the chemicals in her brain, the ABV of the alcohol, the quality of the product and more. It’s not her fault.
As a society, when we see someone in that condition we want to think that she didn’t have enough control or that she “can’t handle” drinking. We blame her for not knowing when enough is enough even though the very thing alcohol does is rewire your brain to want more. We shun her and sip our glasses of wine or our $10 old fashioned feeling prideful that our drinking doesn’t look like that.
Maybe for some, it never has. Those people are lucky. I was not one of them. My drinking looked like that. It looked like me being unable to walk or form sentences. It also looked like me holding a beer in one hand and a baby on my hip as I prepared organic snacks and changed out eco friendly diapers. There were lots of different looks to my drinking but none of them resulted in the long lasting happiness I get from living alcohol free.
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