365 Boring Girl

On not drinking as much.

Charli xcx brought out Brat the summer I turned 365 boring girl.

In 2024, post-breakup and post-Glastonbury, I massively cut down on how much I was drinking. My mental health wasn’t great, a hangover put me into despair, and the relentlessness of Glastonbury had given me the ick. Sorry to offend. I’m sure I would have enjoyed it under different circumstances.

I wanted to repair something, to take control during a destabilising time in my life. Alcohol felt like a good place to start. It turned out to be a bit excruciating, and laden with shame, asking myself questions I’d avoided for years.

Do I drink too much? Are the hangovers worth it? Do I have a problem? Maybe. No. I don’t know.

It had all been fun. So fun. But what was fun at uni, or in my twenties, didn’t translate in the same way anymore.

My friends were splintering. Some were still partying as hard as ever, some were settling down and slowing down. Newly single, it felt wrong not to be going out and having fun. I tried it a few times, but it wasn’t the same as after my last breakup, when I genuinely found unadulterated joy in going out. Probably post-pandemic, post-too-serious-too-soon-relationship pressure release. This time, I couldn’t get my porridge to the right temperature.

The problem was that I stopped drinking and also cut down on socialising, or doing much of anything. Without alcohol, I lost fun, too, something we often incorrectly conflate. Last year, however, I learnt that I could not drink and still go out, or not drink for months and then have a couple of glasses of wine, or go on holiday and drink every day, and then come home and not drink. All things which sound simple when written down, but feel less obvious in a culture where almost every social occasion revolves around booze.

I also signed up for a load of races, which gave me a very good excuse not to drink. One of my favourite excuses for drinking had always been that everyone expected it of me. That they’d think I was boring, or not valuing their event, if I didn’t drink. (Main character syndrome, much.) After all, for most of my twenties, I was the one organising impromptu nights out, lunchtime wines, and inadvisable debauchery. All of which were, admittedly, some of the best times in my life. Which made this new line of enquiry all the more confusing. Who am I if I am not that girl?

I’m not anti-alcohol. But as I’ve gotten older, it’s become harder to ignore its impact, and whilst I don’t envision ever being strictly sober, I am much more deliberate.

What’s undeniable, after two years of really interrogating my relationship with alcohol, is that it does sort of make everything worse. Not the odd glass of wine with a Sunday roast, but the bigger nights out, or cumulative nights of drinking. I’m no longer young enough for one big night not to ruin the next two to three business days.

Gratefully, I realised I actually found it pretty easy not to drink. Socialising sober took a minute to get used to, but with a zero Guinness or mocktail in hand, I’d usually forget I was sober anyway.

I’m not someone who wakes up craving a drink, or even drinks very regularly, but I can be someone who finds it hard to stop once they’ve started. Someone who wants the night to carry on forever, who says stupid things and wakes up mortified and incapacitated.

I used to think there were only two options: someone who can handle alcohol, and someone who can’t. If you fall into the latter category, you must go teetotal. I avoided looking too closely at my habits for years for fear of what I might find. The shame of that almost made me drink more, in defiance.

Thankfully, this wasn’t written in the stars. I realised I can actually quite easily leave events after a couple of drinks, or consciously decide when I want a big night, which invariably reminds me why I stopped doing that so often. I just had to decide that that was the kind of person I am.

Longer stretches of sobriety improved my mental health, skin, work, and routine so much that the idea of a hangover became genuinely terrifying. Feeling ‘well’ more often than not, made the promise of the morning - an early start, good coffee, a run - more exciting than the gamble of seeing where the night goes.

Invariably, the night goes nowhere. It’s trawling the streets of central London looking for a bar that’s still open, only to find everywhere on last orders, and the places that aren’t, full of teenagers. You know this will be the case. You pull the lever anyway, hoping for those three cherries to line up so you can walk through the fur-coat-lined cloakroom into nirvana. (Maybe if London didn’t have such a dead nightlife it would feel less tragic, the escapades we so optimistically attempt.)

There will be a few famous nights you and your friends retell at dinner. The night you took a rapper back to your uni halls for an after-party and didn’t know who he was until your Snapchat blew up the next day (Big Narstie, Cardiff, 2014). Or when you met a boy band member and hung out with him and his friends all night (Niall Horan, Brixton, 2018). Or ended up at some fancy house party (somewhere in Soho, 2021). Or behind the booth with a famous DJ at a sold-out event (Pacha, Ibiza, 2022). We all know these are the exception to the rule. Most nights, nothing interesting happens after 1am. I’ve adjusted that to be closer to 11pm now, due to age inflation.

Through changing my habits, I am changed. The idea of a really late night makes me shudder, and I am grateful for that. I feel pleased that I did this, that I contained the beast. I work in an industry where you could drink all night, every night, for free, if you wanted to. There’s always an event. There’s always free booze.

I tested this around Christmas. I hadn’t been drinking, had been staying up late working, and decided to give myself one night out to really let my hair down, for old times’ sake. It was good because it was instructive. It made me realise that if I do that, it has to be around close friends. I am an over-sharer by nature. Get me three espresso martinis deep and I am Greek tragedy levels of open.

I had been too much myself in front of strangers, and it made me feel vulnerable and embarrassed. I did the rounds ringing my friends the next morning. They all said the same thing. I’m sure you were fine. Everyone else was drunk. No one will care. But I cared. The level of anxiety just wasn’t worth it. And so I learned a new lesson: if I want to go out and get wrecked, do it with people I love and trust.

And I will go out and get drunk again. I love drinking and being drunk. But every weekend? Now when I think about it, that feels like madness. Or maybe that’s just my thirties talking. Maybe it’s my hard-won penchant for running. Maybe it’s Maybelline.

I guess I’m writing this mostly because alcohol is such a sensitive topic, and I really don’t think it’s as black and white as it’s sometimes made out to be. I love wine. I’m an enthusiast, even (this was written in the stars, my name, ahem). I love the ceremony of alcohol with a meal, and the alchemy of the perfect martini. I like losing my inhibitions from time to time, and some of the best, most transformative conversations I’ve had, only happened because of booze. But for the most part, I’ve realised it probably works best as something to be enjoyed mindfully, rather than automatically. If I’m going to get a massive hangover, I want to have chosen it, or at the very least have time for it, rather than waking up full of shame.

I’m glad I’ve learnt this now. I can so easily see a parallel universe where my drinking habits worsened.

I think the idea that you either have control over alcohol or you don't, actually absolves you of responsibility, makes it feel like it's something you can only innately possess. You've just gotta roll with the punches and wait and see if something irreversibly bad happens before you call it a day. There are, of course, people who struggle enormously with alcohol. This isn’t for them. I think a lot of people sit somewhere in the middle. They probably don’t have the best habits, but feel oddly powerless about it, as if cutting down reframes your past behaviour as something darker than it was. But there are all sorts of things I’ve gotten better at as I’ve gotten older. All sorts of habits I’ve changed and dropped.

Despite all of this, I love stories. I LOVE lore. And almost all of the best stories with my friends are from the ridiculous things we did on nights out in our twenties. I hope we have new ones each decade.

I’m sure we will. Just punctuated with lots of good night’s sleep.