Well, This Is Exhausting

by Sophia Benoit

  Opened up two bottles of wine with fabric scissors. (Very unsuccessful in every sense of the word.)

  Had anal sex. (Successful for an extremely short amount of time.)

  Ate a weed gummy bear that turned out to be 100 mg—which, if you aren’t versed in weed, is way too much; 10 mg is like a nice, normal dose for normal folks—had a visual blackout, threw up at a church, and marched—yes, marched—one mile home because I thought the police were watching me and they’d be less suspicious if I was marching. (Not at all successful. One of the worst experiences of my life.)

  Tried quinoa. (Turns out that the nutty flavor of America’s trendiest pseudo-cereal of 2013 is not the way to a guy’s heart. At least I got some fiber.)

  Chopped down a tree. (Successful.)

  Watched a Star Wars movie. (Mixed bag. I found the movie so boring that I blew the guy instead of continuing. So. That probably impressed him.)

  Learned all the lyrics to a J. Cole album (Successful in that I did learn the words, unsuccessful in that… why the fuck would a guy care about that, Sophia?)

  Purchased the book All the Shah’s Men as an ebook because a guy I was talking to from Bumble for over a month recommended it to me, but never read it because I find it very difficult to read ebooks. (Unsuccessful. He stood me up on our eventual date to meet in person.)

  Baked gooey butter cakes and brought them in for the cast of plays I was in in high school.II (Semi-successful. A hot popular senior guy proposed to me. A few years later he came out, so it does not seem like the wedding is going forward.)

  Jumped fully clothed into the Mediterranean. (Successful. I got my first “kiss,” which was really a kiss on the cheek, but I lied and told everyone it was on the mouth.)

  Worked out every day. (Unsuccessful and I still can’t do a single push-up.)

  Read Anna Karenina. (Unsuccessful. Hated the book. Didn’t finish. Had to use CliffsNotes for the first time in my life. No one slept with me.)

  Got into basketball. (Extremely successful for me. I don’t even care about men outside of the NBA anymore.)

  Tried to talk less. (Unsuccessful both in my attempt and it impressing men. It turns out that even when I’m quiet I give off the “Don’t ever speak to me” vibe. I think it’s because I have a really big rib cage, so I seem tough.)

  Cracking Open an Ice-Cold Bud Light

  I came to drinking late, like almost everything else in my life. I had my first cigarette at age twenty-seven and I only smoked it to take a picture.I I didn’t try weed until I was twenty-one. I didn’t even have coffee until I was nineteen, a year after my first kiss. I was behind in every nonacademic department imaginable. Mostly because I was trying very hard to be good and because I think my parents read me too many Boxcar Children books.II For most of my youth, I planned on not drinking basically forever. By the time I was leaving for college, I had made it through high school without taking up Pretty Much the Only Fun Thing to Do in St. Louis, Missouri, and I figured I could survive college sans alcohol as well.

  In high school, when I was first glaringly sober, I didn’t realize exactly why my teetotaling ass lurking at parties made people chafe so much.III I assured my friends, “I’m fun without alcohol! I don’t need it to have a good time! I’m already loud and crazy enough; you don’t want to see me after four Smirnoff Ices.” I begged them to believe me, but they remained unconvinced, likely because what drunk people do not want is a loud, opinionated, kind of judgy sober person. They want a chill friend. Now that I’ve had a drink (not to brag), I understand that getting drunk is a deeply shameful state where you’re willing to be yourself. It’s horrific to be yourself, especially as a teenager, and no one sober should be around to witness and therefore remember it.

  Naturally, I got invited to fewer and fewer parties (if you can call fourteen teenagers taking bad pictures with digital cameras in someone’s basement a party). I genuinely resented all these people for picking tiny things like “being cool” and “getting laid” over their friendship with me. I complained about this often to my mom, who would remind me that it was probably a good idea to not drink because of alcoholism on both sides of my family and also, what if I got caught and got in trouble and had my college admissions ruined?IV My mother kindly suggested that perhaps I was more of a daytime-hangout person, and that I wasn’t necessarily meant to socialize in big groups of people. “Why don’t you just invite one or two friends over during the day on Saturday? Or after school?” she would often suggest. Because, Mom!!! I’m trying to be something I’m not! Instead of heeding her wisdom, I just kept trying to force it.

  But my mother also deeply empathized with the feeling of being left out of something. She understood what it was to want to fit in, to go along with things to please people. After months of awkward sobriety, heartbreaking loneliness, and an abundance of caution, I again asked her what I should do. Was I supposed to not drink and be uncool forever, just for the sake of being “good”? Was I supposed to stay unfun until the age of forty-seven, when all my peers would catch up to me and be similarly boring on Friday nights? I have no idea how my mother kept a straight face while her seventeen-year-old daughter came to her asking her if she should drink at the next party, to help her weigh the pros and cons of imbibing some stolen store-brand vodka. She calmly asked, “Well, do you want to drink?” To which I replied, “No, but I also don’t want to not be drinking.” My mother reiterated that she understood if I felt like joining in and reminded me for the four thousandth time in my life that I could always call her to pick me up and she would come, no questions asked. Yes, I realize how pathetic it is to announce to your parent that you’re going to misbehave.

  So the next party I went to (I had to be invited to it because it was a post-show party for the winter play I was in, and everyone in the cast and crew got invited), I decided to drink one beer. If I sipped on it all night, I’d have something to do with my hands—the real reason to drink—plus I wouldn’t have a scarlet U emblazoned on my chest for Unfun, since for the most part no one cares how little you drink as long as you fucking put some alcohol in your mouth, goddamnit!!! Also, one beer wasn’t so much that I couldn’t drive home safely. My plan was brilliant. I know.

  Unfortunately, even brilliant plans have flaws. Have you ever even seen Ocean’s 8? Yeah. Things go awry. Even Sandra Bullock makes mistakes. That was the night I found out what beer tastes like. It tastes awful. Specifically, to me, it tastes like if you left piss out in the sun for a few days and then crushed up wheat and emulsified it and then somehow made that piss/wheat mixture sour and bitter (or maybe that’s just from leaving it out in the sun?) and then you served it to people, like a massive fucking asshole. Whoever first created beer: okay, I get it, you needed a lot of calories easily and cheaply, and drinking water wasn’t as sanitary as your nasty new invention. But to whoever first pretended that beer tastes good: fuck you. You’re on my shitlist along with people who don’t appreciate JLo’s acting career and people who are on their cell phones while ordering something.

  So there I was, with a fucking Bud Light in my hand, and a sip that I could not, would not, swallow. Luckily, all parties in the Midwest take place in someone’s unfinished basement, so I spat it on the concrete floor, right into the drain that all basements have. I don’t make the rules; I’m sure some construction regulatory body does, but all unfinished basements have a drain in the floor, and it seemed like a good place for my used beer. People laughed and enjoyed my “first time drinking beer” face, and they all moved on and I held on to the 99 percent–full can of beer for the rest of the night and I went on with my life with brand-new knowledge: beer sucks.

  I came home to my mother, marched up to her bedroom, and immediately shared the new information I had. “How the fuck do adults drink this? Why is cracking open a beer portrayed as a thing people do after a long day of work to unwind?” I was incredulous and she laughed at me, which is probably her best trait, in my opinion—how often she laughs at me. She and
I devised another plan. I have to give her credit, this was her idea. The next time I got invited to a party, a few weeks later, I grabbed a beer, had some people witness me opening it; then I went to the bathroom, poured it down the sink, rinsed out the can a bit, and then refilled it about halfway up with water so that it didn’t look like I was a weirdo holding an empty can.V While this “worked,” it didn’t make me a chill person, which is the actual purpose of beer. People tolerate the rotten beer-piss taste because they need to crawl out of their skin suit for four short hours.VI I didn’t get that at the time.

  I finally gave up and realized, much to my chagrin, that my mother was right: I was a “daytime hangout” person. I was meant to meet up to study at a Starbucks. I was meant to bake cookies with other girls. I was not meant to watch girls named Katie sit in the laps of boys named Justin while I was stuck holding beer water. Did I learn this lesson and carry it with me with grace? Hell no. I just kept forcing the issue via a sort of misguided exposure therapy.

  The whole concept of exposure therapy—which I’m almost sure no one reading this is unfamiliar with—is to gaslight your brain into being okay with fear. The premise suggests that if you just keep going to parties and feeling like the Trunchbull in a room full of Miss Honeys, one day that knot of pain in your chest that is telling you to both run and cry will dissipate; in its wake will be a staid comfort with all things social. I don’t want to dismiss exposure therapy—it seems to work wonders for people on My Strange Phobia—but it’s not ever going to fix how being sober in a room full of drunk teens feels. It’s the most excruciating awareness of just how boring you are, stretched out for hours, set to the tune of “Party in the USA.”

  And that is why I started drinking. The truth of the matter is that I come from a long line of unfun people on both sides of my family. We’re high-strung and careful. We’re philosophical and judgmental. We are smart, we are hardworking, we are funny. But we are, by and large, not a fun group. And that’s where alcohol comes in. As my mother so frequently reminded me: we’re alcoholics.

  Really, the only notable thing about my family members’ drinking problems are how tame they are; drinking is the white noise machine in the corner rather than a smoke alarm going off. No one is a fun drunk or an angry drunk, and often, they’re not even drunk at all. They’re all just drinking. Constantly. (Or they’re in the process of cutting back, which is usually much more commendable than successful). They’re drinking because their kids don’t visit as much. Or because their wife is cruel. Or because they never learned to be fun without alcohol. Or because some part of their brain needs red wine every day around 4 p.m., otherwise it will rattle around their head.

  Drinking in my family looks like red wine with dinner, and usually after dinner and often before dinner. It looks like a bottle of wine per person per night, which doctors might describe as “too much.” By 9 p.m., everyone makes a little less sense and gets a little more sleepy than the average person, but if a stranger walked in, they probably wouldn’t be able to tell right away who was drunk. The drinking is to make it through. The drinking is because it’s worse if you don’t drink.

  Of course, on holidays and during family events, the intake increases. Then—when it’s more like one and a half or two bottles per person per night—everyone gets (somehow!) louder and (somehow!) cries even more easily than they do while sober. My family is made up of people who are a poetically bad combination of critical and sensitive; Malbecs act as fuel for both. Everyone hurts feelings a little more and gets their feelings hurt a little more and usually someone goes to another room to cry or to do dishes passive-aggressively. If you’re doing the math you might be thinking, Wouldn’t it be better to stop drinking, then? Wouldn’t it cause fewer hurt feelings and inane arguments? Yes. Yes it would. But most people in my family are in a little too deep; they love alcohol just a little too much and they haven’t done anything so bad as to warrant checking into a rehab center in their opinion.VII

  Every time I go home brings a new method for stopping, or a new soon-to-be-unfollowed rule. No drinking before five. No drinking before noon. No drinking at home (if you knew how agoraphobic my father’s side of the family is, this would be even more impressive). No drinking if you haven’t worked out that day. No drinking alone. Hard alcohol only (that’s how much my family likes wine). One person bought a shock bracelet that he pushed every time he drank to break himself of the habit. It didn’t take.

  My family doesn’t lie about their drinking habits—it’s not a secret how much they love alcohol—but neither do they talk about it in ways that might be productive, that might get them help, or that might actually acknowledge what happens when they drink. In my family, alcohol consumption is treated as a personal issue, like having arthritis, rather than something that could—and does—affect others. And as much as a health issue this is, the amount each person drinks is mostly treated as an inevitability, a fateful quirk of the body. The older family members get, the more convinced they become that drinking is just part of who they are, an immutable fact about them like their hair color. Yes, you can cut it or dye it—or buy a shock bracelet, or make a new rule—but the tendency is innate. Pretty much everyone genetically related to me just drinks. All the time.

  And for most of my life, I didn’t understand why. I had no desire in high school or college to actually consume alcoholic beverages; I just wanted to fit in and get invited and be fun. I was (and still am) a high-strung person in general, which was fine—beneficial, even—in an academic setting, but off-putting in a social one. I was always cleaning up before the party was over so there was less to do the next day, offering people refills, asking people kind, thoughtful questions, remembering everyone’s name. I approached college parties with the same level of staid professionalism with which most people approach networking events. I just didn’t have any idea how to relax. Liquor is very, very good, it turns out, at helping you chill out, and I needed to.

  Specifically, the reason I started drinking was in hopes of becoming palatable. To men. I know, I know, I know. But, come on, you had to expect this of me at this point. The reason I started drinking was not because of how painfully unfun it was for me to nurse a Shirley Temple in a roomful of people on their thirteenth Coors Light—it was because of how unfun it made me seem.

  Sober men can be brooding and moody and taciturn and it’s fine; in fact, sometimes that makes them more hot. (I really wish God would fix this; seems like a massive oversight.) Women can’t be that. You can’t be standoffish, slow to warm up to new people, or even indifferent. You don’t get to be in the corner and sip a club soda and have no energy. You have to give everyone your fucking energy all the time or you’re a bitch. I was already nervous enough around men due to not talking to them until I was seventeen, and also due to caring immensely what they thought of me, and it became clear—after about four college events where I interacted with guys—that being sober wasn’t helping.

  Just to give you a taste of how bad I was at talking to men, I was once at a party where the Outkast song “Ms. Jackson” came on and I said—loudly, in an effort to seem cool—that it is impossible to apologize a trillion times, since it would take thousands of years.VIII Which is a scene that might pass as awkward-cute in an indie movie delivered by a hauntingly beautiful protagonist but which in real life falls very flat.

  I tried very hard to keep up with my credo that you didn’t need to drink to have fun, but frankly I was just so fucking tired of being left out, of not getting to play beer pong because I didn’t drink, of not getting flirted with because I was sober, of not getting to retell stupid stories the next day, of not getting male attention, of not having an excuse to be irresponsible. And I figured alcohol would help. I was still somewhat in the throes of an eating disorder, so when I started drinking late in my sophomore year of college, I began with Skinnygirl piña coladaIX mix combined with Diet Mountain Dew, which was actually not as bad as you’re probably thinking. And it worked. Sort of. K
ind of. At the very least, it stopped being as weird that I was hanging around drunk people until 2 a.m. For the first time in my whole life, I had both a drug to help me relax and a built-in excuse if I was ever “too much,” which is something I worried about being constantly.

  If you’re a woman, alcohol buys you something incredible, something priceless: a break from responsibility, a glimpse of the invincibility cis white men feel all the time, an excuse for being too much. You can—at least during the drinking—let go. You can be loud, you can be flirty, you can take risks, you can triple text your ex.

  Straight cis men don’t need alcohol to let go as much, I don’t think. I mean, I’m sure they have anxiety and love the feeling of getting to relax. But they get to be reckless so much more often than women do. Even when drinking, women have to stay more alert, be more careful. If you tallied up all the times I’ve been drunk around men, I have done way more of the caretaking than any of the guys has. They’re allowed to fall apart, to be messy, to steal road signs, to be loud and drunk in line at Jack in the Box. Women aren’t given the chance to. We still have to be on the lookout for danger. We have to stay in groups. We have to be careful whom we let be in charge of getting us home. Even just on an emotional level outside of safety, men aren’t punished socially for being irresponsible, aggressive, or careless the way women are. Guys can get in a bar fight, steal a fire extinguisher, break onto the roof, and it’s funny—it’s what boys do. Women don’t get as many chances to let our guard down; we’re so used to having to be alert that it can be difficult to let go even a little. But tequila can help you.

  And when you do give in and live a little, relax a little, drink a little, you become so much more appealing to men. Why? Because your inhibition is lower, which really means you’re more likely to put up with shitty behavior. Women who have been drinking are “more fun,” yes, but they’re also potentially less likely to reject men. Or at least, that seems to be the working theory. The (very reasonable) expectations of a sober woman are simply too much for a lot of straight cis guys to live up to. It’s so much easier for them when we’re drinking. A woman with two glasses of chardonnay in her system is just so much more approachable. And isn’t that the best fucking thing you can be, ladies? Able to be approached by a man?