Drunk In My Twenties

Did alcohol keep me from asking deeper questions?

Paul Millerd
10 min readJul 7, 2021

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Photo by Blake Lisk on Unsplash

I stopped drinking for the second time when I moved to Taiwan. I never planned to quit. It just happened. I went to night markets instead of bars, met my now wife who doesn’t really drink, and slowly the desire disappeared.

I found this fascinating. The first time I quit drinking I was recovering from a health challenge with Lyme disease and as I started to recover and be more social, spent more than a year worrying about what people might think about me. I developed stories, excuses, and ways of making others feel comfortable.

The biggest what if I think about is what if I didn’t drink in my twenties? Was that even possible? Would I even have had the same friends?

American Parties & Party Schools

I had not spent a single moment thinking about alcohol until I saw that Budweiser announced it would give people “free beer” if the US met the vaccination goal of 70% of adults with one shot before July 4th. It looks like the US will come up a bit short, but they’re still going to give out the reward (after all, it was a marketing gimmick for…

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