Anything to Be Cool

I am a twenty-two-year-old recovering alcoholic. I began drinking and taking drugs when I was fourteen years old. It was the year 1994 and the rebellious songs of Green Day and Offspring surrounded the world of the fourteen-year-old. We were a generation inspired by the skater crowd, the nineties version of the sixties' greasers and the eighties' punk rockers. To be in the cool crowd, you had to wear clothes eight sizes too big, walk cool, smoke cigarettes and pot, and drink beer. In those days, I would have jumped off a 100-foot cliff if it meant I could be considered cool. Drinking a petty beer or smoking a little joint was an insignificant hurdle for me on my road to social acceptance. After all, I was invincible and the worse the action, the more attention I would receive. I attended the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) classes and sat through countless drug-prevention speeches, but those did not apply to such a cool rebel without a cause.