Waved.

The title of this week’s post is very fitting as I open up about one of my many battles. I saw a tweet about how we don’t discuss alcoholism at university, which lead me to think about my time at university and the influence that drugs and alcohol had on me at the time.

During uni, I dealt with a lot of situations and at the time I thought I handled it the same way anyone would, it’s only looking back now that o realise how dangerous and detrimental the things I was doing were to my mental and physical health.

In first year I remember drinking a lot, mainly during freshers. But then when I learnt how to roll, everything went full scale. It would be alcohol and weed. One or the other on a daily, sometimes both. There was a time I couldn’t sleep without smoking. I was telling myself that was just my way of coping and weed was harmless. Not realising how I was worsening my already existing mental health issues.

Alcohol was my best friend during second year and the start of third year. There would be times where I would drink anywhere from half a bottle of wine to a full bottle of wine in the evening, be drunk, sleep, wake up fine the next morning and do the same thing again, day after day. I remember being sat in my room with one of my closest friends who I call my cousin crying and drinking wine but laughing about it like I was just having a moment. But it was something repetitive.

Looking back on it now, it scares me that it ever happened and also how normalised it was. It was seen as “uni stress” for me to go on benders for literally days at a time of alcohol and weed. At the times I felt lonely, I used them to comfort me and make me forget.

It’s important to talk about things like this because you don’t realise how common it actually is but how little is done to help students at uni with mental health issues. It’s sad really because while I was at uni, there was a lot of pressure and certain expectations of me that made me grab these things as a clutch. There definitely needs to be a conversation about this topic in order to get students help and better support during uni.