By: Aaron Richardson
An important part of living a healthy life is maintaining healthy relationships with the people you surround yourself with. When you’re in your early 20s, there are a lot of important relationships that can impact your life. But the most important relationship that you’ll have is with yourself: your drunk self, I mean.
When you enter university and start partying and drinking, you’ll learn many lessons. One way to survive that time of your life and get through it without too much difficulty is to develop a good relationship with Drunk You. Here are some tips to build trust in that relationship, and ways to heal after it’s been damaged:
- Know how much you’re drinking. This is on both of you. When you start out the night, Sober You has control, and it’s on them to make sure that you don’t down three shots of 151 at the beginning of the night. But soon Drunk You takes over, and it’s their job to make sure you don’t vomit (which you will anyways, but at least they can try).
- Drunk text yourself. There’s no better way to wake up in the morning with a splitting headache than to look at your phone and see a long and thoughtful text describing how much you love yourself. When you’re drunk, take this opportunity to apologize to your sober self for all the mistakes you are about to make, and the repercussions that will follow your sober self for the rest of your life.
- Leave out a glass of water for the next morning. While you’ll be too nauseous to keep down the water for more than a minute, at least you won’t be dry heaving.
- Don’t fall asleep in the gutter. I really hope I don’t have to explain why . . .
- When you inevitably vomit, try to keep it off of yourself. Ideally try to keep it off of other people as well. But that’s a difficult one, so don’t strain yourself too much.
- The most important piece of advice I can give you is to learn how to forgive yourself. Drunk You will make mistakes. This might be hard to accept, but it will happen. It’s natural for Drunk You to call your ex 15 times in half an hour. It’s entirely normal to break an arm jumping off a roof when you’re describing that scene from that one movie you saw a couple weeks ago. If you want to maintain a positive relationship, forgiveness is key. Don’t hold a grudge against Drunk You. Live, learn, and drink again.
