On the way to work this morning, I listened to an interview with Brendan Cowell, actor and director of new Aussie flick ‘Ruben Guthrie’. In short, the story follows a Sydney-based advertising dude who, like most Australians (and most people in advertising, for that matter), drinks too much. The interview with Cowell this morning spoke a lot about our nation’s infatuation with the bottle, catching my attention as it raised one question most of us are too scared to ask ourselves: if we weren’t drinking on the weekend, what would we do?
In light of the fact that we are smack bang in the middle of Dry July, the topic of sobriety and abstinence from our dear friend The Bottle is on hot rotation. The Dry July participants are spinning around in green fields, proclaiming how fresh and alert and wonderful they feel, whilst the rest of us schmucks with the self-control of a hamster glumly wonder how, if, and when, we will ever share in their happiness.
Can’t, or won’t.
It’s a line that’s been laid flatly on me many times in my life, most often by personal trainers, my mother, or the Chinese man at the North Bondi newsagency who hates me because I always ask if I can pay for my Sunday morning newspaper with eftpos. To say you ‘can’t’ is often for a good reason – not that it’s too hard, but it’s just not the right thing to do. ‘Won’t’ is different. ‘Won’t’ is knowing you can win, but deciding to fail. ‘Won’t’ is rusted with feelings of guilt and worthlessness, and will eventually tarnish the initial exhilaration of stubbornness with pure, acidic, eroding, regret.
So, not drinking. Is it a ‘can’t’ or a ‘won’t’?
Like every other Gen Y Australian teen, I cut my teeth in the social scene getting well and truly shitfaced. Every event, every party, every moment that involved boys and girls (ooh!) in which we were exploring our adulthood, freedom, and emerging personalities; inadvertently rotated around booze. Specifically, the buying, consuming, and hiding of it. Getting it was half the journey, begging parents and older siblings and bemused bottle shop owners. It really splintered the ‘cool kids’ from the crowd: they were the ones that could get it, and what heroes they were.
Closely followed were those who could hold their booze. As a pretty tiny sort of teen, it took approximately three sips of, well, anything and I was under the table. I remember how disappointed I would be when that first wave of blurred, wobbly, nausea would hit and the night would disappear through your hands like sand. My innocent teenage girl daydreams of kissing That Guy or finally getting up the nerve to talk to the Cool Girls were steamrolled by something far more adult – being too drunk to do so. It was truly the axis in which childhood met adulthood, and I look back on it with a real sense of sadness.
This discovery of how shitty it is to be ‘too drunk’ was a shock to me then, and remains a shock to me now. Except at 26, when you get too drunk to achieve the things you need to do (like go to your cousin’s 1st birthday party, or a family BBQ, or clean the house, or work on Monday) the shock of sudden drunkenness is now joined by something else the next day: the thick, dull, pounding shame of guilt. We’ve all been there, and the old I get, the worse the ‘day after’ anxiety becomes. It’s almost at the point now that I dread situations which I know are set to become boozy – not because I won’t have fun (AIN’T NO PARTY LIKE A MAGGIE KELLY JELLO SHOT PARTY), but because I dread with a heaviness in my heart the twang of guilt and sadness the next day.
Yes, sadness. And no, I’m not talking about the ‘Menulog doesn’t open til 12 and it’s only 9am and I am struggling with the most crunchy hangover ever’ sadness. I’m talking about waking up hungover and realising another weekend has slipped by without you actually taking time to rest, rejuvenate, feed your mind, relax, carve out quality time. Two weekends ago I had an absolute ball-tearer of a weekend, which started at 5pm on Friday and finished up at 9pm on Sunday. It floored me for a week. And burned into my mind is the image of my reflection when I finally (FINALLY) was getting ready to call it quits on the Sunday: sad eyes.
I was bone tired. I had drunk too much, spent too much, said too much. And therefore had not done enough – not enough resting, not enough housework, not enough self love. Just a shitload of booze and burritos and cigarettes and all the other nails in the coffin you pick up as you roll along in the rampage. And at that moment I thought: I don’t want to do this any more.
Can’t, or won’t.
It’s the choice that I am now rolling around in my mind like a morsel of exotic food I can’t quite yet decide if I like or not. Can’t I, or won’t I? Can I, or will I, decide to stop drinking? Is it a mountain too high to climb; or a molehill I just can’t be bothered stepping over?
The Australian culture is, without question, shaped around the act of drinking. I used to find this fact saddening until I realised that most cultures are: families laugh over a bottle of wine in Italy, friends celebrate with a champagne in France, people relax with a quality tequila in Mexico – most world cultures have, and have for centuries, used alcohol to socialise. The difference in Australia is that we don’t drink to enjoy, we drink to get drunk. And that’s the problem.
Even now, thinking about a night out makes my heart race a little…getting ready, everyone feeling bright and giggly and happy, the adventure, the escape from Monday to Friday sensibility….and then it starts to darken. Because this is the point that instead of getting a cheeseburger and going home, many of us decide to push our bodies further and sprawl it out in an all-night rampage. Is this the Australian glitch? The moment where our culture has sharpened some sense of competition: keep going until you can’t, and then – and only then – can you say ‘I won’t’.
I don’t really have much else to say just yet, because I don’t actually know what the next step is. (The fact I thought a glass of wine was a good next step isn’t overly promising…) What I do know, however, is that Ruben Guthrie and Brendan Cowell and Sunday Sad Eyes have rustled up something deep within me that supersedes a simple folding of a chapter in youth – this is something bigger. This is wondering how to carve out a social setup in a society which is infatuated with being inebriated.
A big fat question that I also have too been scared to ask myself: if we’re not drinking on the weekend, then what do we do?
