The Morning After a gala
It feels like the wind is knocked out of me whenever I go drinking and dancing. The exhaustion that washes over your body post-fun may not dampen the fun that was had the night before, but it chips away at the part of you that wants to go out and have fun like that again. It doesn’t get rid of it completely, but overtime, it will lessen the youthful desire to go out and indulge hedonism.
The end of a university school year brings galas, which usually bring university students by promising free—or cheap—alcohol and food. I have attended a gala every week for the past three weeks; one I helped organize, one hosted by the college I attend for studio classes, and one by the Student Union for my university. It’s not hangxiety, since I never drank enough to lose control of myself, but it’s fatigue that I’ve noticed most. The college gala I attended last week had an open bar, and—when surrounded by my peers—I had a shot. Immediately after that shot, I felt a sense of doom; I didn’t want to be drunk. Isolating myself for ten minutes or so, I braced myself for the feeling of the room spinning, or my stomach dropping like on the drop of a rollercoaster, but it never came. Reflecting on that moment the next day, I felt like I’d phased into another stage of my life; I didn’t want to get drunk, I didn’t want to lose control, and I was more comfortable avoiding the actions that would lead there as opposed to dealing with the aftermath of them.
Amongst my peerage there is the sense of an emotional stunting that has come about during and post-Covid. Heading into the pandemic, I was in my final year of high school, and was still a teenager. My family and loved-ones were safe throughout the pandemic, luckily, but the emotional weight of living through it still altered our perceptions of the world, and our hopes for the future. A joke that I’ve heard, that “you’re only as old as you were when the pandemic started” demonstrates this emotional stunting best. The experiences of the generations that raised ours—Gen Z, in my case—which we were told to look forward to, as our parents recollected their university and college days at the kitchen table during meals, were out of our reach. Either they would be available to us to experience at a later date, or never at all, as the world was forever altered.
The last few years of my life, as things began reopening and people became more comfortable being around strangers again, were spent playing catch-up for what I believed I needed to experience as a young adult. Now, at twenty-two—nearly twenty-three—I feel like I’ve missed the chance to ever experience such things as they had been regaled to me in my childhood, but I also feel too tired to seek them out as they are now.
Or maybe I’m just iron deficient and I should go get my blood tested.
