Drifting with Direction

I don’t drink alcohol very often for a few different reasons. The biggest one of those is I don’t like wasting my time – I have things I want to achieve, and every day spent not working towards them is a chance I’m giving up. But another reason I don’t drink very often, as anyone who has ever been out with me will confirm, is that I like to disappear. (And I’m very very good at it… you can see how that could cause potential problems).

But even if my mind has absolutely no sense of consequences on those nights, I kind of understand the fragmented logic it is attempting to follow. It can be suffocating spending too much of your time fixed in certain behaviour, or trapped in the same social circles, or forcing conversations you don’t care about, or curbing your jokes because people don’t get your sense of humour. Clearly alcohol for me is the switch where I just walk away from those situations (and away, and away, and away… I’d love to know what drink made me think walking twenty miles alone through downtown Miami was ever going to work).

In a similar kind of way, some of my most enjoyable nights out were when I either didn’t feel the need to wander off or I could quite happily drift from group of people to group of people. Every person and every place has something a little bit different about them and it’s not always what it appears to be. Everyone has pieces of their personality that don’t quite belong with the company they keep or the town they live in. Those under the surface parts of people are the parts I like discovering. And I think quite often we want to share them, we just don’t always know how to. We all get trapped by whatever boundaries we think frame the life we’re supposed to live; the conversations we’re supposed to have and the opinions we’re supposed to agree with. But it’s suffocating, and I think it’s ok to need a step back from that.

I think where I’m trying to go with this is that it’s ok to not feel comfortable. It’s ok to drift… whether it be from people, or places, or yourself. How anyone can know where they want to live “when they grow up” is beyond me. It can take time to find the people or the places that bring out all of the best versions of yourself.. it can take time and maturity to realise you don’t have to do what everyone else is doing (and you can figure that out without the influence of alcohol). You can care what people think of you, but only if those people are people you respect. Finding them is worth it… everyone else is probably too busy worrying about themselves to care anyway.