I Have A Drunk Texting “Problem”

By

I suffer from a disease. Drunk Texting.

There are many things about technology that I love, namely the ability to keep in touch with virtually everyone you’ve ever met. This, however, means that you have the ability to stay in touch with people that probably should be allowed to fade out of your life. In times of yore when you broke up with someone, they would virtually disappear without means like cell phones, texting, Facebook, Twitter, etc., to keep you connected.

Our generation has waded into murky, unchartered waters where we can contact anyone we want instantly with the touch of a send button.

Some of my friends have also experienced the problem of drunk texting, but their episodes have been borderline cutesy and able to be laughed off. Mine are the equivalent of farting at a funeral. Highly inappropriate, making everyone involved uncomfortable and avoiding eye contact with me.

Also, inexplicably, my texts tend to revolve around song lyrics. Not deep, thought provoking lyrics, but pop song lyrics, inevitably directed at either current love interests or exes. Never in my right mind would I text one of my exes in broad sober daylight, but as soon as night falls and the drinks in my hand disappear, suddenly the lyrics of that really popular song that’s playing on the juke box really speaks to me, and I must immediately transcribe them to the unfortunate victim they remind me of.

The worst of my many transgressions was a few years ago. It was my friend’s birthday and we had rented a limo and were heading downtown. Quite a few red Solo cups later we made it to the first bar and after that– shit gets hazy. I woke up the next morning in a state of dehydration and confusion. What was the last thing I remember? We were at the first bar throwing back shots of Patron.

Stumbling out of bed, still in my dress from the night before, I found my clutch lying on the floor in my bedroom, and my phone, which miraculously was still in my purse. I opened up my messages to text my friend asking WTH had happened last night and that’s when I saw it. The last person I had texted was my ex- boyfriend, the one that there was a humiliating amount of drama and heartbreak with, and for whom I had spent the past year painfully arranging my Facebook page to make sure it looked like I was fan-fucking-tastic without him. Horror. I opened the message and true to form it was song lyrics from- wait for it- Shontelle’s “T-Shirt”. Gotta be strong/ Gotta be strong/ But I’m really hurting now that you’re gone. Spelled perfectly correct. Time stamped 2:52 a.m.

What. The. Fuck.

How I managed to coherently text anyone in a blackout state, much less my ex, is still beyond me. I suspect divine intervention and lots of laughs and knee slaps from the Big Man. Do I send another message?

“Hey, sorry about that, I was totally blacked out, man. Didn’t know what I was saying!”

“Hahaha Liz stole my phone and thought it would be funny to text you!!”

“I’m a complete waste of life. Sorry for being psychotic. But you already knew that about me…”

Instead I SOS dialed my best friend, who happened to also be friends with my ex, for an emergency therapy session, which she picked up because any call from me at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning was clearly an emergency.

“Oh, that’s bad, Annie. That’s really bad.” She couldn’t really offer me any words of encouragement. There were none. So I creepily remained silent and hoped that somehow the text would disappear from existence and everybody would forget it even happened. Wrong.

She called me a few days later saying that my ex had called her to chat, eventually saying, “So, uh, have you talked to Annie lately? She texted me a few nights ago…I didn’t really know what to say.”

“Wait, was it song lyrics? Yeah, she texted that to me too. You know how she gets with the drunk texting.”

So my best friend smoothly covered my tracks for me so that I appeared sane once more. Fast forward two and a half years. The setting was similar. Bar. Shots of whiskey. Cell phone in hand. My friend whose birthday it was during the previous drunk texting incident was with me and about four shots and a pitcher into the night, I turned to her and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I texted [censored] again with THE SAME LYRICS FROM LAST TIME hahahaha??”

I’m not sure why my judgment fails me so unbelievably in a whiskey colored haze, but it was nowhere to be found that night. I actually had to GOOGLE the lyrics because I couldn’t remember exactly how they went, and still thinking it was a good idea, sent the exact same lines as last time except with “haha” at the end.

Dehydration and confusion woke me again the next morning, and I let out a wounded animal howl when I saw my ex’s name (who I had not spoken to in years by this point) as the last sent message. Cue emergency best friend phone call.

“…I don’t think I can bail you out of this one, Annie.”

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