This is fact-checked. I can’t drink.
Not even half a glass of wine!
After one minute, I will begin to blush, and after five minutes, I might feel dizzy. Ten minutes later, I will definitely be using all my strength not to puke. But most of the time, I just simply don’t drink to then avoid all the embarrassment. I once got a headache from a marinated crab, “That’s ridiculous!” I heard my grandpa in heaven laugh at me.
It deprives the self-indulgent adulthood image of me. I wanted to receive a text message attached with a video clip of me last night, taken by a fake friend, that reminded me of how drunk I was last night. I puked all over the taxi while yelling at the driver to stop in the middle of the road before I then rushed out and climbed up on a palm tree, screaming to the world that I know how to live for another 500 years. But that never happened and very likely won’t happen in the next 500 years.
The can’t-drink problem has a ripple effect that leads to other parts of my problematic adult life like I can’t walk in any shoes with heels, I don’t want to eat at a proper dining table, and I don’t want to drive a vehicle that has four wheels. I’m also certainly not interested in Louis Vuitton himself or anything bling bling.
Someone told me having a dream when you get old is a shame. But who said I have a dream? Maybe I just have a lifestyle. I comforted myself that I don’t need to drink to be interesting; I don’t need to be everybody’s ‘adult’ to fit in. I can hold a conversation while I am drinking ice water, or I can make a meaningful connection while I am licking an ice-cream cone. Sorry, the ice-cream part is a bit disgusting. However, no matter how much I defend myself, I am still falling into the shame of self-loathing.
One day, I was spinning the glass in my hand, pretending to listen to the ice cubes clunking, which were really just a diet coke, when the waitress passed me a cool brown bottle. I asked what it was and assumed she must look down on my diet coke. She said I might like it, “This is for non-alcohol drinkers, and it’s called ginger beer.” I sipped it, and immediately I felt the full spice of fresh ginger in my mouth, and the fake beer foam overflowed the mouth of the bottle like a real beer. When my friend came back from the bathroom, I smiled at her mischievously, and she said she didn’t know that I drink beer. “Oh, this? Yes, I do,” I said shamelessly, and I saw a light beam break the cloudy sky and pass through the ceiling crack, shining on me.
Later on, it became my transparent disguise to go out with friends; the half-joking, half clumsy self-revealing technique is my new strategy to blend into this world. Sometimes I will order mocktails; the name of the mocktails is really a disgrace like you are being laughed at in the face while you are pretending! But I still can’t get drunk, and I still can’t lose myself to the world. Is that it? Losing oneself to the world is a symbol of adult life? Along with bikini shots on the beach and a hotel roof party on New Year’s Eve? Maybe it will never be me. Maybe I will never grow into this way.
I often imagine this tacky scenario that one day I am given an Oscar award, and I am not going to tell a story that I was holding a shampoo bottle to practice this speech for 30 years. I will just wear a pure white shirt and black pants to tell everybody that an hour ago, I was stopped by some American hunk on the red carpet, and he thought I was some random fan who was trying to get into the event for a selfie with Leonardo DiCaprio.
