At 21, I'd finished uni and was working for an accounting firm. I was in a long distance relationship with a guy from Sydney, had great friends and family around me, and was generally fairly 'happy'. Although now knowing what 'real happiness' is like, I probably wasn't even close to it.
I still had my issues, but was working hard to bury them in alcohol. I'd drink heavily every weekend without fail (but so did my friends, so I wasn't sticking out) and if my core group of friends decided to stay home with their partners, I'd go and drink with other friends or my sister and her friends. Or I'd climb the walls until I found other people to drink with.
My 21st speech was riddled with friends telling ridiculous drinking stories of me vomiting and passing out on a regular basis. But so were all my friends speeches at their parties. I was no different to most of my friends. Was that because I had surrounded myself with people with drinking and drug problems so I didn't stand out, or because that was just the norm of the day? (None of my friends have come out with major substance abuse issues yet, so I guess it was just the norm).
It was nothing for me and my friends to rock up to a party with a slab each. It was nothing to go out to a club or bar and for our nights to end in a mess of all in brawls, tears, passing out, and vomit all over us, sometimes not even our own. And if we got home relatively unscathed, the next morning we could almost guarantee one or more of us would be heaving bile and running to KFC for a hangover burger.
Hearing my cousin and his mates talk about 100 shots in 100 minutes I was thinking, 'Oh god kids these days would surely be much worse than we were'. A lot of my friends were heavy drug users, and some even dealers, but stories I hear of kids these days are of everyone using Ice, and stabbing each other. (Maybe an over exaggeration?)
Then I heard them talking about struggling with the shots. Thinking back I remembered my two best friends and I with our traditional tequila shots every Grand Final night and how much of a struggle it was to get it down at times. A group of friends had had a major car accident one Grand Final night resulting in one friend becoming paraplegic. His favourite drink was tequila, so we always drank tequila on Granny night in his honor. We'd play a drinking game, and get obliterated on tequila... My favourite black out drink.
I asked my cousin and his mates what they were shooting... Jack Daniel cans. Jack Daniel cans? Pre mixed? That's not doing shots, that's just pouring your pre mix can into a shot glass! Weak!
Maybe these kids aren't as bad as we were?
By 21 I'd done so much ridiculous crap! My mates and I would go to bikies clubs to see bands. With barely a passing thought to the strippers and lines of coke on the bar. We'd scam our way into people's houses after last drinks were called so that we could go back and drink their grog and use their drugs. We never wanted to go home.
We would never leave the Lyric (A Geelong nightclub) before 'stumps' (sun up). We'd go to parties where our friends were the gate-crashers but our parties weren't the one's being crashed.
One of my favourite parties was one in Corio, a girls 17th. My two besties and I arrived, and met a few mates there. Walking into the kitchen, which was an inch deep with Fruity Lexia, a couple of mates were putting cutlery and cask bladders into the microwave to try and blow it up. People were throwing the occupants belongings into the pool from the roof. TV's, Video's, their Christmas presents which were under their tree all wrapped nicely.
People were doing belly wackers into the pool off the roof, and the lights kept getting turned off so there could be a blind all in brawl. One of my best guy mates was accused of hitting a girl in this blind brawl, and was subsequently subjected to another chick punching him and smashing a bottle over his head while he stood their and took it saying 'I don't hit girls, I'm not fighting back'. So trying to be a tough biartch, I said, 'I do' and tried to pull the chick off him, she turned on me and pushed me into a glass mirrored bar. She eventually gave up hitting him when he kept refusing to fight back.
The night ended with another friend pouring petrol over a boat out the front and setting it alight before we all did a runner.
Surely kids these days are worse though? There's stories on the news and all over Facebook every week. Or do they just seem worse because of social media and the fact they can video stuff on their phones? We didn't need accidental Facebook party invites back in our day, everyone knew when their was a party on.
Thinking back, we really weren't any different to our parents. Things just weren't as readily available back in their day. They were the worst generation of their time because they had acid and weed and free love. They made the most of what they had, and so did we. Kids these days just have social media, mobile phones, and better chemicals than we did. Every generation is just looking to outdo the last with better drugs, bigger weapons, and better ways to gain notoriety. You Tube and Facebook is making it easy for these kids. We had to work hard for ours!
I'd love to run a social experiment and send the kids of today back in time firstly to the eighties and nineties and then back to the sixties and seventies and then have them come back and tell us which decade was harder for teens.
Every kid, of every generation has the same thing in common. We're all just trying to find our way. To fit in, to stand out, to forget the bad times and immortalise the good times. No generation is better or worse than anyone before or after them. Maybe if social workers and youth workers remembered this they'd have more success getting through to kids.
When do we start owning our battle scars and realising that they make us who we are today? That they shape our future, but that we can change anything we don't like at anytime and we can get ourselves out of situations, that our life is truly our own. We have the power to turn around and face our demons head on.
Some people will drink and use drugs all of their life, and for most people that's fine. Its always a personal choice. Some people will choose to be straight edge. Some will live hard and get sober, some will never admit they have a problem.
When you realise you have a choice, you can go either way...That's a sign of maturity, not a number like 21 or 30 or 60. You don't have to grow up, or grow old. Its just a number. But maybe maturity is when you learn to love yourself. You learn to wear your battle scars proudly and learn from them. I know that I try to never make the same mistakes twice, but if I do it just means that I have another lesson to learn. As long as you keep moving forward and keep learning, because that's all you can do.
So no matter your age, I hope you're learning to take notice of life's lessons, because that's what this journey is all about....
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