As I write this column, it’s my birthday. Not an ordinary birthday, but my twenty-first birthday. The birthday that I, and many others, have looked forward to with eager anticipation. I can finally drink alcohol, legally.
Unfortunately, I, and the many others who have eagerly anticipated their twenty-first birthday, have also been drinking alcohol since we were teenagers. We have scrubbed off black Xs, used fake IDs and pre-gamed at our older friends’ apartments. Underage drinking culture has become a normality of youth.
In addition to being dangerous, adolescent drinking has dulled the excitement of turning twenty-one. The allure of legal drinking has lost its appeal.
For many young adults, the festivities of a twenty-first birthday have become the normal weekend routine.
I celebrated my own twenty-first birthday last night at midnight. I went to Sixth Street in Austin, like every person who has ever turned twenty-one in Texas.
Despite staying in a swanky downtown hotel, being surrounded by the people I love and wearing the outfit that I had picked out weeks ago, my twenty-first birthday felt strangely uneventful. The question, “This is it?” continuously turned over in my mind. It was not that I was ungrateful, or that I didn’t have a great time. I danced for hours, took too many Snapchat videos and drank an unhealthy amount of alcohol. Yet, the entire night I could feel an underlying sense of familiarity.
I had done all of this before.
It wasn’t until this morning, my actual birthday, that I realized why the night felt off. I have been drinking alcohol for years.
I was under the naïve impression that my first legal drink would be remarkably different. It wasn’t. It was just a normal vodka pineapple. It tasted exactly like every other vodka pineapple I have had before.
I know underage drinking will always exist. It would be impossible to eradicate this behavior because alcohol influences our culture so heavily. I just want it to slow down. I wish I had slowed down, or waited to drink alcohol until I was of legal age. Maybe if I had waited, my twenty-first birthday would have been the glamourous night that I had always fantasized it to be. Then again, I may not have remembered it.
