I Started Hitting the Party Scene Sober — It Taught Me the True Power of Alcohol
Stopping drinking alcohol and continuing to party taught me the true power of alcohol
In my late teens and early twenties, I was big on the party scene, I was out nearly every night and to say that my alcohol tolerance level was high, would be an understatement. But then one day, mainly because I decided that I wanted to remember my life rather than spend most of my time forgetting it, I stopped drinking. But I kept going out partying.
My experiences taught me the true power of alcohol.
Disclaimer: these are accounts of my own personal experiences from the party scene during the mid-noughties in my local area, and I recall them only to share my experiences with alcohol and I make zero further statements in regard to anything else.
Alcohol not only robs you of your awareness about what happens to you, but also other people
Stating the obvious I know but bear with me. Everybody knows that when you are in busy nightclubs, people are going to constantly be bumping into you. Some people would try to use this as an excuse to grope people — or at least when I used to party they did.
It frequently happened to me, a squeeze of my ass, a squeeze of my crotch even, sometimes my arms, sometimes my abs. Despite the frequency it used to happen at, along with the constant people bumping into me, I rarely batted an eyelid.
That was until I stopped drinking. When I went into a club sober, every single bump would annoy the hell out of me. It would just fill me with such annoyance, like stop encroaching my space. And the unwanted groping, that really started annoying me. In truth, I was quite shocked at how it had not annoyed me in the past. Sober me would never have allowed something like this to happen to me, and yet sober me had not even realised that drunk me had been allowing this to happen so repeatedly.
The culprits were normally either one out of a group of women in their thirties or forties or a younger woman out with one of her gay friends. I started to call them out on it. I would spin round, and they would either immediately apologise or freeze on the spot — like a rabbit caught in headlights. The thing that shocked me was how shocked they would always be that someone had actually called them out on it.
Then I started people-watching, and when I started people-watching for the first time I realised just how much unwanted groping both guys and girls, especially of the good-looking kind, have to put up with when in nightclubs. Often, there would be either a group of women or guys, they would pick a spot where a lot of people would walk past, and then, as if a game, they would attempt to sneakily grope the good-looking guys and girls as they walked past.
What shocked me was that the vast majority of people they groped just kept walking, both male and female. They did not even bat an eyelid. I had used to be one of those males who had just kept walking, not even batting an eyelid. It was only once I stopped drinking that I started calling them out when they did it to me.
It massively distorts your memories through the power of retrospective thinking
Everybody knows that alcohol messes with your memories, that’s why the courts call any person who has been drinking an unreliable witness, it is also why if you drink heavily, you have great difficulty remembering just what the hell you got up to the night before.
Only when I stopped drinking, did I properly realise just how much it does mess with your memories. The number of times I had nights out, and the next day the people I had been out with recounted something happening that did not happen even remotely how they recalled it happening, was crazy.
I even started just for fun joking that things happened in a different way than how they did, yet to my astonishment the times I did this my friends often thought I was being serious and these things actually happened. What shocked me even further, they started adding to them, so I would say this happened when it didn’t, and they would say that they remembered, then would start building on it.
So literally, I’ve just made something up, and now they not only believe it happened that way, but are elaborating on it as if they are recalling it from true memories.
For example, one of my friends worked as a bouncer, and on one of his nights off we were out and there was a fight, he was way too drunk to get involved with trying to break it up. The next day he could sort of remember the fight, and he asked me if he helped with breaking it up, “I did didn’t I?” he asked me.
He certainly did not, though I joked that of course he did. He didn’t realise I was joking. Nor did the other two who had been out with us, and so they were all sat there building up the story of how he broke up the fight and kicked out the drunk. When I told them that this did not happen, they thought I was lying.
I could hardly believe the irony. I jokingly lie assuming my friends would know it was not what happened, yet the opposite happens. The joke becomes the truth, and my attempts to highlight that became the lie.
I assume, and this is just my assumption because I am no expert, but I assume because my friend, had he been sober, would have stepped in, and everybody knew that, and all they had in their minds were flashes of what happened, they simply put the pieces together using retrospective thinking.
So, they used flashes of distorted memories that a fight had taken place, used what I had said to add to those flashes along with what they thought would have happened had my friend been sober, and Bob’s your uncle. My joking account of what happened is suddenly the true account, and I have to spend ages trying to persuade them that I was just joking and that it did not actually happen like that.
Alcohol distorts our memories, because of that what we do is try to piece those fragmented memories together based on how we think we would have acted if sober.
The trouble is when we do that, often what we end up with is an illusionary account of what actually happened. For example, one time when I was out with a friend, and he got crazy drunk, he took it upon himself to randomly squeeze a woman’s bum, so he groped her.
I remember being stunned when he did it, it was totally out of the blue, I don’t know what he was thinking, perhaps he thought it would be funny to do it and try to blame somebody else, who knows.
He obviously got called out by the woman, then got into an argument with her, trying to blame it on someone else. Then he turned on her boyfriend — who had tried to step in to calm the situation. I pulled my friend away, dragged him out of the club, and took him home. The next day, this was what he said to me, “can you believe that guy started on me.” (“Starting” on someone means you attempt to lull them into a fight.)
I was stunned by the statement. My friend had “started” on him. But in his head, the guy had “started” on him because apparently he had accidentally bumped into the girl and spilled some of his drink on her, and the girl had then thrown her drink at him. He had called her out on this, and the boyfriend had stepped in.
My mind was blown. Where the hell had he even got this account from? I then told him what actually had happened. And he could not believe it, kept saying he would never do that — any of it. And I believed him, sober, he would not. Drunk, he had.
With his fragmented memories, I assume that he had put the pieces together based on how the sober him would act.
He had spilled some of his drink on the girl, and in his head that had become the inciting incident — not him wilfully groping her trying to pretend it was not him, which is what actually happened.
If I had not been sober that night, he would never have believed he had done what he had done — he may never have even known he had done what he had done.
This is not the only time something like this happened. I was out with some friends from university, there was a big group of us, eleven in total. One of my friends, I will call him Ron, was massively into someone who I will call Sarah — she was massively into him as well.
Sarah got absolutely wasted (so very drunk) but Ron was not a big drinker so was only a bit tipsy, he also was quite reserved. Sarah was the opposite, very forward, and extremely outspoken. As the night went on, they started getting close, but then suddenly she tries to kiss him, he repels her. She starts getting furious, all of us can hear what she’s saying, asking if he is gay, demanding to know what’s wrong with him, on and on she is going.
After pulling them apart, Ron tells us that he felt she was too drunk and didn’t want to take advantage — he was visibly upset. The next day, we find out that Sarah has told people that he was the one who had tried to force himself onto her and that was why she had got angry with him. All of us had witnessed what had happened, very much it being her trying to force herself onto him.
Yet to my surprise, everyone seems to be siding with Sarah’s account. I start to question maybe whether I had missed something that they had not. But then Sarah’s best friend arrives at university, she also had not been drinking that night. And when she hears what Sarah has been saying, she is furious. That’s not what happened at all, it was Sarah who tried to force herself onto Ron.
Sarah is adamant she would never do that. Ron is adamant that she had. Sarah’s best friend is adamant that she had. Everyone else no longer wants anything to do with the situation.
Then there’s me, I witnessed it and was sober and from what I had seen, it was indisputably Sarah who tried to force herself onto Ron, and Ron who had tried to repel the advances. Sarah’s best friend asked me what I had seen, I told her but made clear that I did not know whether anything had happened prior. She tells me that it hadn’t.
Eventually, Sarah accepted that she had been the guilty party and apologised for her actions. If her best friend had not been sober, she may never have done so. But hell, even now I wonder what actually happened — did something happen that we didn’t see. I don’t think anyone will ever know. Not even Ron and Sarah.
Final words
Getting drunk can be a lot of fun, it is simply inescapable. There is no party on this earth that does not become more fun when alcohol is added. But, stopping drinking and continuing to go out partying opened my eyes to the true power of alcohol. Which is to rob you of your awareness of what’s happening to other people and yourself, to make your memories completely unreliable, and to make you capable of doing things that sober would seem incomprehensible.
We are all taught these things, I knew all about them before I started even drinking alcohol, but only when I stopped drinking and witnessed these things happening first hand did I truly understand their meaning. That’s why I would recommend anyone who likes going out partying, to try doing so sober for a while, it’s amazing how it has the power to change your perspective about things.
That’s all from me, thanks for reading!
If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy the following:
She Was 5 ft, I Was 6 ft 2 — I Was Mentally Abused by Her
What If The Problem Is Not Other People, But You?
The Ten Craziest And Most Death-Defying Stage Acts Of All Time
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