Death of a Party Girl
A painting by Carrie Bencardino takes up almost an entire wall in my bedroom in Austin. I bought the painting at Art Basel Miami. It was the only painting that spoke to me. I snapped a photo of it and sent it to my friend, who said it looked like us at the afters with the bloodshot eyes and messy makeup and wonky facial expressions. I’m looking at it now while I contemplate the last time I was in a liquor store. It was the morning of January 2nd and my friend and I were high on cocaine. The guy ringing us up looked us up and down and asked what our resolution for the new year was. Party more? He chuckled.
We looked at eachother, saying at the same time that we were actually trying to party less. I couldn’t believe it. I’m about to be 30 and it was just last night that I thought I was never going to get old, that I could keep living the fast life for as long as the road was paved with whippets and ketamine and MDMA and cocaine and poppers and weed, which would be always, meaning I would never have to stop if I didn’t want to, and for so fucking long I didn’t want to. I find it fascinating that suddenly while buying liquor during a bender with an old friend we found ourselves saying we wanted to party less when just last night we were rolling on Molly while confetti and balloons fell from the ceiling of the venue we were partying at and we said we were going to be party girls forever.
I find it funny how things can so drastically change within the span of a few hours. I find it depressing that it’s the drugs that are accelerating every emotion until we feel like we are God, like nothing has to be any more serious than we want it to be so we can party on. We can forget everything except the way those balloons looked when we were all rolling and the clock showed us we now are in the year 2025. I find it beautiful that I have the time and energy and desire to do more with my life while still using drugs and thinking about the confetti raining down on all of us beautiful ravers during the last night I went out. I want to party less, and the moment in the liquor store where both my friend and I agreed that we weren’t as into partying for as long as we thought we were going to be the night before proved that.
I know I have to take something seriously at some point, which isn’t to say I have no interests or hobbies or intellectual pursuits besides getting fucked up and dancing, but I guess what the club taught me is that there is nothing that’s really all that serious, nothing that requires such vigilance that I can’t enjoy a night out at the club, which is both a blessing and a curse. I only have a ton of festival wristbands and empty drug baggies and concert tickets and VIP passes to show for my 20’s and not much else. I didn’t need the 7-11 guy telling me to party more. I’d rather not party with friends than party without friends, and I have more friends than I’ve ever had right now. If you had asked me 6 months ago where I saw all this dancing and clubbing and drinking and drugging going I would have said it was all about having fun and chasing highs, making it sound so easy breezy and light hearted. In that moment where I was rolling at the rave with all my friends and all that confetti I wanted to nail that label of “party girl” down. I wanted to keep partying over and over day after day. I wanted to recreate that moment, all about chasing highs. I was never going to stop. So my friend and I promised we’d always be party girls. The next day in the liquor store we promised we were never going to be again. Doesn’t mean we stopped moving, we were high for the next few days, but a seed that was planted just this summer is finally starting to bear fruit.
I contemplate changing the Flume track that’s bothering me and then remember I’m listening on a record player so I can’t skip it and the reason for the decade old Flume album is because I remember when we were all sitting in someone’s dorm room at a hippie school in Portland and at the time we all agreed Flume was going to be considered a classic by the time we looked back, so I looked back just long enough to want to go home with the overpriced Flume album I found in the back of the electronic music section at the shop in Austin, Texas. Flume is an Instagram personality now, so I’m not totally sure where things went wrong, but in those rainy Oregon days I thought we were all right about everything, so I bought the Flume record not because I think it’s a classic but because in the times where I thought it would be we were all smoking weed and dropping acid and doing research chemicals and everything felt like it was destined to be iconic, and sometimes I want to be reminded of those times. We were all so confident.
That was back when I wore my hair long and parted to the side and I listened to Fidlar and didn’t have any tattoos and wore makeup and I liked to sit in the woods with my friends smoking blunts and dabs and joints coated in resin. Flume and Odesza were all I knew of electronic music at the time, and the only reason I knew of them is because that’s what we all listened to in Highschool and college. Listening to him now I find it odd his music is not what turned me into a raver (that was AC Slater at Bonnaroo). We listened to Flume when we were chilling, not raging. I used to always be chilling…
I guess why I never danced to Flume or explored the scene he was operating out of is because that one particular album of his reminds me of how much I hate house parties, which is what Portland had to offer. That album gave me a way to be social that protected me from having to be around copious amounts of cheap beer and horrible conversation. We felt connected to the music, to each other, playing that album in an almost ritualistic fashion while grinding the weed and pulling out the bong while we sat in the woods with our coloring books. That was enough for us at the time, and I didn’t know until I wrote it out that I had everything I didn’t even realize I had been looking for.
The night stays young, it's us that gets old, someone sings from me off the record player. Old is an unfortunate word, and does little to act as a descriptor. True, I’m getting older and the proof of that is me reminiscing on the times when I thought I never would. Another fact is that I’m not simply getting older- my fundamental aspects of being are changing violently fast. I’m an active participant in that change. I still have the opportunity to do all the things I was doing before, in fact I’m still listening to electronic music, but I don’t indulge because even if it’s what I want, I see patterns in my 29th year of life. Everything is connected and choices don’t just tie us down anymore they alter the course of our lives. I bought that Flume album to remember all the choices I didn’t even realize I was making while I was getting high in the woods with my friends and listening to it now I can see so clearly where my youth went. I lost it to music and the scenes that exist within it. I wasn’t in it for the community the way I was with Flume or Odesza. I was in it for the escape. I was in it so I could look like I was just enjoying my 20s while all those other choices that could have furthered me in life passed me by. I was in a lot of pain and in the midst of a deep sense of loneliness, so I was in it for the fleeting happiness of it all, for the euphoria. God I love feeling euphoric.
That’s where I spent my youth- trapping myself in a cycle of happiness and a brutal crash everytime I came home after a show, even if I wasn’t drunk or high. Constants are changing and so am I. I can’t even envision myself at a festival anymore even though I have a few lined up throughout the spring. I think about canceling them all often. I think less about the way the drugs felt when the confetti was falling all around us and more about the ones who have to clean up when it’s all over and that person is always me. I yearn more for classic Flume than I do for Zeds Dead or even Charlotte de Witte. This is something I don’t care to admit because that means Zeds Dead and Charlotte de Witte are coming to a close. Partying is not what I’m made of. It’s something that I did to survive.
As of late, I’m preoccupied with looking for records I can put on with my friends. You never know what music you’re going to carry throughout your 20s or 30s or beyond and you never know who’s going to be along for the ride while you do it and you never know how it’s going to evolve and change every year, every month, every week, every day, so now I find myself listening to songs I listened to when I was so young I thought everything would stay the same year after year because I couldn’t imagine anything changing at all since it was already so perfect. It was perfect at the time, but the times don’t do anything except change.
If I ever catch myself feeling too young again I’ll remind myself how wrong I can still be about things when I’m 60, 70, 80, and how okay that is.
Take changes as they come and admire the songs that got us through. Those are the songs that we haven’t always played but can make some part of us feel whole again no matter what stage of life we’re in. I have healed a long stretch of my life just by finding that one Flume record. The good times are brought to the surface. They were good times I couldn’t enjoy in the moment because of my abusive ex, Max. He controlled me so completely that anytime I did anything with friends it turned into a long, ugly, draining fight. That’s what I think of college as. But underneath all that deeply disturbing misery are bong rips, vaporizers in dorm rooms, climbing up trees with a dab rig, drops of mysterious liquid on my tongue, going for hikes, browsing used books, selling clothes to Buffalo Exchange, going vintage shopping, looking at the way Mt. Hood shines when the sun is out. I’m grateful Flume was the soundtrack for that time period.
I’m being self-indulgent by spending so much time writing about the way things once were, but it’s the only way I can make sense of the way things are now. My heart feels heavy as I let go of the past that defined me for so long. Beneath all that is a sense of light that comes over me as I write this. I have a distant sense of fondness for my time in Oregon and in the clubs in New York and a present sense of confusion over how those good times happened so fast and burned so bright and seemed to glow only yesterday, only to realize that confusion can be grounding. These emotions are chaotic and conflicting, as they are with any act of mourning, which is what I’m doing now.
Flume reminds me that good times can exist in the same sphere as loneliness and sadness and regret and remorse and all those 20something feelings that sprout at any age when faced with uncertainty. I don’t have to hide from the ugly shit to enjoy life, to enjoy music, to dance, to connect and admire the beauty of life. For so long I thought I was using drugs to escape trauma and low self esteem, but I got high alone in my room because I didn’t have anyone to get high with. I was deeply and spiritually alone. I lived in a narrative I spent my childhood creating- the narrative of the bad bitch. I was resilient and strong. I could survive anything. I didn’t need company to live my life loudly. I needed this narrative to protect myself. I sold myself a lie that I didn’t need friends or a boyfriend or anyone. I could navigate life all on my own. All I wanted to do was protect myself from my own mind, so I told myself stories about my identity while I drank because that’s what comforted me. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, so says Joan Didion.
None of that addiction stuff and all the partying that happened this year was about trauma or the simple act of being lonely. I wanted to find a way to put myself in a new box where I could be the carefree party girl instead of the depressed lone wolf that I was before I started going out. Slipping into a new identity is easier than thinking about who I really am, or who I really could be.
Letting go of my party persona as change happens all around me is a lot to handle. I’m shedding all of my old roles and I don’t know what the next one looks like. I’m devastated it can never be the way it once was. I’m relieved that I’m freeing myself of the role as the lonely, depressed, mentally unwell, drug addicted, mysterious bad girl. The constants are changing. So much was certain for so long. Whether it was doing drugs or listening to Flume or drinking or having casual sex or staying up all night or going out on a Monday or even just seeing all my friends every day to do shenanigans- there was never any question those things would happen. I didn’t have a defined path that was lighting my fire and guiding my way, but that never made me feel lost the way it does now. The only thing any of us have to be certain about now is bills and that unnerves me. This downward spiral was not meant to bring me to the revelation that the party is over for me or at least the party I once knew is.
The sense of euphoria that comes from living completely in the moment is a height I could only reach while high or while dancing at the club. I want to explore that feeling outside of a venue as much as I can. I even feel it right now as I write this with the Flume record in the background. All those crusty old stories put me in a box and now that I’m starting to get free my only obligation now is to explore. Of course, change is happening from moment to moment. I could always change my mind next week or tomorrow even and hit up a friend so we can kill a bag of blow together. But even if I’m getting high I’m never, ever alone now. That shows such an incredible amount of healing and growth and progress and hope and trust and confidence in myself that it brings tears to my eyes.
At the end of the day, after all the pondering and questioning and soul searching and self-indulgent blogging is over, I put on records I listened to in college and remember that Atmosphere was right. In between the pride and the misery with the infinite supply of sympathy are these invisible walls that hold me like this goldfish bowl is the whole sea. I’ve been a lot of different people throughout my life. There’s a lot more people I’m going to become as the years go on, and a lot more people I’m going to bring with me. Thank fuck I explored all the versions of myself that were bringing me down. Now I can ascend and transcend.
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