From The Bottom

 The last year of my university studies before the eventual collapse of my mental health and subsequent suspension of my studies was an extremely wild one. It goes without saying that uni and college culture is more or less focused on partying and getting wasted, but I would argue that the Finnish university students take this mentality to a new level. There is not just a lot of alcohol involved, drinking has been mobilized by capitalism and turned into a money-making machine that pumps out artificial student traditions that you have to take part in and, most importantly, get shit-faced in. 

It was my third uni year in a row, and I was in a depression pit so deep I'd forgotten what the stars even looked like. I wasn't eating properly, I was in a constant state of dissociation, and I had just started taking anti-depressants again after a two-year break. Nothing seemed to fill the void my mental agony and the never-ending stream of literature and linguistics essays created in my life, so I did what almost every Finnish uni student does in that situation: I went clubbing nearly every weekend. 

University was a tough place for me for a lot of reasons, but one of them was that I was struggling to connect with anyone, to find any kind of friends. This was a very familiar problem for me, one I almost welcomed into my embrace with open arms. But there was one girl I got pretty close with, and with her, we did a lot of drinking. We did other things too, but it was something we found ourselves gravitating towards time and time again because the city we lived in and the studies were eating us alive day after day after day, and something had to be done about it. So in we went to the nightclubs, spent hundreds of euros on shitty white wine and liquor that made us throw up at the end of the night. The hangovers got progressively worse each time, but we didn't really care.

"Pinnalta kaikki näyttää pieneltä ja sievältä; pohjalta kaikki on suurempaa, kauniimpaa, parempaa."

moonshine.
original finnish lyrics by aki tykki of happoradio (song "pohjalta"); translated by ichigonya.

The last moments of uni felt like I was watching myself crashing into a brick wall. The situation was completely out of my control, I was helpless and hopeless in the midst of immense stress from my studies that I had started to hate more than myself, my blooming borderline personality disorder that went unchecked by every mental health professional I came in contact with, and the emptiness the endless partying was creating in my everyday life that was now colored in the shades of my own vomit next to my bed.

My father is a recovered alcoholic. Despite the way this article may sound, I don't think I was ever at the risk of developing an addiction to alcohol, and my reasoning for it is this: I never liked the feeling of being intoxicated. I didn't like the idea of drinking, I didn't even particularly enjoy the taste of alcohol. It was never about the liquor itself; it was about distancing myself from the workload that was crushing me under its weight, desperately trying to set myself free.

And now that I am free, I have never missed the moonshine on my table.

Rising to the surface,

ichigonya