leftover thoughts — the person vodka makes me

usually i’m a very quiet person. the kind you forget was even in the room. when i get noticed i often make the whole situation awkward, which is fine, since i’m pretty introverted anyways.

sometimes i still wish i wouldn’t be so awkward or introverted. the kind of people who seem to thrive off of social interaction, who just attract attention like it’s nothing, i always admired them.

now the first time i  was completely drunk was when I had a lot of vodka. at the moment i didn’t realise how drunk i was, but thinking back i had to be.  

i remember i was out with some friends (my childhood crush was one of them, yk him in case you read one of my first blogs lol) and we sat at the harbour. one of the guys had brought two bottles of vodka and since we were pretty young we thought we’re oh so grown up and cool for doing this. we just sat for a while, drank the vodka straight from the bottle and it was like it always was, they all talked and i listened, sometimes commenting on something they were saying. with time those comments got more and more and suddenly i was telling a story myself.

i never did this before, especially not with that group of people. i had to consider myself lucky to even be allowed to exist near them. i don’t even know who decided that hierarchy, but in my head it was very clear. they were the loud ones, the effortlessly cool ones. i was just kind of… there. the extra chair at the table. tolerated, not necessary. i don’t think they ever said or did anything to make me feel that way — which almost makes it worse. it was just something i decided about myself and then treated like a fact.

but as i told my story they even actually listened. not in the polite, half-distracted way people sometimes do when they’re just waiting for their turn to speak. they were looking at me. laughing at the right parts. asking questions. adding onto what i said instead of talking over me. and i remember this warm, almost dizzy feeling that had nothing to do with the alcohol — or maybe everything had to do with it.

for once i wasn’t the background character in my own life. usually i’m hyperaware of the space i take up. how loud my laugh is. how long my story is. whether i’m interrupting. whether my face looks weird when i react to something. it’s exhausting, constantly editing yourself in real time. that night there was no editor. just me.

i wasn’t calculating every sentence before i said it. i wasn’t replaying my words mid-sentence, wondering if they sounded stupid. they just came out. messy, loud, unfiltered — and somehow that made them better. i was funnier, quicker, lighter. like someone had taken the heavy coat of overthinking off my shoulders.

and the craziest part? they didn’t seem to mind. and i also didn’t mind. it didn’t drain me at all.

so the next day i woke up with this odd sense of belonging, also a bit of pride for not overthinking for once and i told myself that it must have been the vodka making me more confident. so i tried being more confident in my day to day life, just saying what comes to my mind. of course it got awkward again. i tried many more times, every single time it ended the same: the other person was weirded out by me.

so maybe vodka made me say more, but it felt nice being that person. it wasn’t just confidence. it was the strange, dizzy feeling of them actually liking me more.

(btw this blog is not written to promote alcohol consumption or anything, i am simply amazed by the person i was that night)