14 Stages Of Getting Drunk With Your Friends In Your Mid-Twenties

Golden Globes
Golden Globes

1. Great Expectations

It always starts with overestimating yourself. You’re super bored and unmotivated at work, so you start a group text proclaiming that you need to get drunk tonight. Because it’s only mid-afternoon and the day is still filled with lots of hope, everyone excitedly agrees.

2. Eating Too Much At Dinner And Wanting To Bail

Whether you’re at a restaurant with friends or you’re just sitting on your couch with a frozen meal, you feel it – an immediate desire to become a sloth. All you want to do is put on pants with an elastic waistband and do nothing. You have no idea how you are possibly going to rally.

3. Hoping Someone Else Will Be The Debbie Downer So You Don’t Have To 

Sizing each other up, either at the restaurant or through your text messages – wondering if anyone will be lazy enough to say they don’t want to go out, so that they rest of you can also stay in but blame them for being the ‘lame’ one.

4. Having That One Friend Who Convinces You That Going Out Tonight Is Your Destiny

They come over to your place, make you a drink, and practically dress you themselves. Or, they scream at you on FaceTime and send you a string of dramatic emojis announcing that if you don’t go out tonight, you are the absolute worst. Somehow, before you know it, you’re wearing pants and standing in the middle of a pregame.

5. A Wave Of Hope At The Pregame

Maybe you’re tired from working all day, maybe it’s just the magic of having a lower alcohol tolerance now that you’re older – but a couple drinks in, and suddenly you feel like the happiest, most loving person in the world.

How could you possibly have thought you didn’t want to go out tonight? Your friends are all dad-dancing to “Hotline Bling” and you’re venting about how much you hate your jobs – it is pure therapy.

6. Utter Pandemonium When The Uber Arrives

As if none of you have ever been outside in your life.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLan4LmaSho%5D

7. Going To An Awful, Loud Club Because Your One Friend’s Tinder Match Is There

You all walk in, see sweaty infants grinding all up on each other on the dance floor, and march straight for the bar… after assigning somebody the job of finding somewhere you can all sit down. Because the only way to survive a dance club full of 19-year-old’s with fake IDs is liquor and sitting.

8. The Shot That You Do Not Want To Take

Eventually shots get involved, usually because your already-drunk friend starts talking to a bachelor party and they decide this is the GREATEST idea in the world. But you know all it means is something neon-colored or breakfast-flavored. Always a lose-lose situation, but who are you to let alcohol go to waste?

9. Crossing The 3-Drink Threshold

You’re perfectly capable of handling more than three drinks in one night. Your body the next day, however, is not. The moment you order your fourth drink of the night, you know there’s no turning back. Because whether you’re just slightly buzzed or drunk as a skunk, you will feel awful the next day no matter what. But you do it anyways, because your friends promise they will be suffering right along with you.

10. The Accidental Drunk Stage

Completely unpredictable. An untamable beast. No warning of when it’s going to present itself.

You could have several drinks one night and feel sober as a bird, but have the same amount on a night like tonight and be on your ass with no warning sign. It’s just part of the beauty of residing in a body that no longer consumes alcohol on a collegiate level.

11. Planning Your Drunk Meal While You’re Still At The Bar

Eventually you reach your limit for socializing and drinking, because you’re in your mid-twenties now and this is how the world works. So you sit in your chair, pretend to listen to the conversation at hand, and have an intense inner debate about whether you should order Papa John’s or get Taco Bell.

12. Getting Home And Eating Your Drunk Food In Under Three Minutes

And not feeling bad about it, because your friends finished theirs before you did.

13. Being Terrified To Go To Bed Because You Know A Hangover Awaits You. 

You watch every single thing on your DVR and eat a second round of drunk food and text your friends and scroll through Instagram to avoid what you know is coming. But eventually, you hit the pillow with the knowledge that hell is fast approaching.

14. Being Dead For Two Days. 

Lying dramatically on the couch, claiming you’ve never felt this awful before, calling your friends and asking why you all decided to drink this much, announcing that you need to get your life together, etc. It’s all part of growing up. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

I’m a staff writer for Thought Catalog. I like comedy and improv. I live in Chicago. My Uber rating is just okay.

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