I could write a thesis on the joys of being a little bit hungover. That is what I said to my editor Zoe when we started planning a week of content about parties, and that was what this piece was meant to be about, until I started writing and didn't have much to say about it anymore.
I’d subscribed to that theory for a while: that being a little bit hungover is the nirvana of alcohol-induced brain impairment; a level of dust where your thoughts switch off and you can just exist, like transcendental meditation for party girls.
For a long time I had also advocated for being really hungover. As someone who has spent large chunks of life basing my self worth on how productive I am, what my job is, whether I’m doing enough to to get myself to a place of imagined success I can’t even draw the outline of – all the things that come with the plight in of being a millennial who sincerely read Sophia Amoruso’s #Girlboss once – being really hungover felt like a good escape from it all. I justified it as some sort of self-enforced bed rest most easily attained by making yourself sick, akin to breaking your own finger so you can take the week off.
I’m aware this justification makes me sound like an alcoholic. I’m not, but I did live in London for six years, from age 20-26, which resulted in what a therapist would call an unhealthy relationship with drink. Before that, I wasn’t very good at partying.
As an overly ambitious teenager with access to the internet, I wanted an exciting life, and wasn’t interested in the rite of passage of going to university to lock yourself in a room and duct tape 1.5 litre bottles of Scrumpy to both hands. Instead, through my university years in Auckland, I was the type to leave the club early, alone, and wake up to a stream of texts that were all variations of ‘where r u’ ‘txt me back’, ‘HAVE U BEEN MURDERED’. Besides that, my recollections of that era are quite hazy, which probably means I still got drunk a lot. But it was more of a chore than a choice; a desire to live out the fantasy of the best years of your life, when really, I spent a lot of time crying in my room and being hungry.
I was doing D-grade modelling at the time, by which I mean the odd e-commerce shoot that paid for my salads. According to my agent I had funny legs and a weird nose, but I still harboured a secret desire to get shipped to Tokyo for being hot. Sadly I was simply not symmetrical or well proportioned enough to be plucked from obscurity and thrown in a Japanese ad for baby wipes. I was, she informed me, cookie cutter, and despite my best efforts to fit into clothes better suited to a prepubescent teenager, I was destined for features in a local wedding magazine and test shoots you had to pay for.
At some point, I realised that I didn’t have to rely on my great legs and elegant nose to move countries. So I applied to a university exchange in London. And while those Auckland years were characterised by deprivation, London was all abundance. Being 20 on the other side of the world felt like stepping into a Playstation game where everything was new and shiny and bright; my avatar a better version of the one I’d always lived in.
Joan Didion wrote in Goodbye to All That, her essay about leaving New York, “one of the mixed blessings of being 20 and 21 and even 23 is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before”.
This makes it easy to romanticise everything. I romanticised hauling suitcases on the bus from one sublet to the next. I romanticised sharing a room with my cousin’s cousin, an investment banker who would get home after I’d gone to sleep and leave before I woke up. I romanticised living with an Australian makeup artist called Shaz who I agreed to share a room with after meeting her once over whisky sours at an All Bar One, though I still remember that as one of the most freeing living situations I’ve been in.
We would dine on cheap feasts of egg frittatas and discount dips on the floor of our bedroom because we didn’t have a living room. We also lived with a German girl who was so deep in drug-induced paranoia that, a few months later, she convinced herself I was sleeping with her boyfriend. She would sneak into my bedroom at 12am and 3am and 4am to check he wasn’t in my bed. I had met him twice. The extent of our conversations was a head nod. It was thrilling until I was scared for my life.
This piece is meant to be about partying, not flats or work, but those are often inextricably intertwined. And while I was freewheeling through increasingly precarious living situations, I was chasing some sort of career path with a kind of blind dedication that feels foreign to me now.
My first internship, at a glossy magazine so thick you could batter someone with it, was attained through dogged persistence. Knowing no one, my approach was to identify an exciting person working at an exciting place and either find their email, or make up versions of it until I struck one that didn’t bounce back.
Eventually, a fashion editor at LOVE Magazine responded and offered me a month’s work experience. When I got there it all felt very glamorous in a Devil Wears Prada adjacent kind of way, though I was paid £10 a day. Stanley Tucci didn’t give me free Chanel but we did have to tidy our desks when the editor came into the office. On my first day I stacked it on the tube escalator on my way to deliver magazines to Vogue house, earning a striped bruise on my thigh I wore like a badge of honour.
Later, after stints at uni and a cafe as an extra on a Harry Potter spin-off film (another childhood dream realised, before we all collectively realised what a cunt J.K. Rowling is), I got an internship, then a job, at i-D Magazine. At the time it was owned by Vice, and the shared offices on London’s New North Road felt like the epicentre of everything.
I was surrounded by people who were young and smart and partied a lot, and part of me associated proving myself at work with proving myself in the pub. So I drank and ate and worked and partied and did cheap drugs on a Wednesday. I interviewed celebrities and dog couture designers. Smoked in front of the office to make new friends. Got drunk off open bars at work events. Kicked on after the kick ons. Embarrassed myself, inevitably. Said yes to it all.
A lot is said about New Zealanders’ dependence on alcohol, which is fair, but in London it felt like the lifeblood that kept that great city churning. Mainly because it’s legal to drink everywhere there. People spill out of pubs onto roads. Lads throw themselves in brown canals after their football team wins. Everyone swarms leafy fields armed with cans of beer and bags of crisps from the local offie.
Coming from New Zealand, a place where the other day, I saw a man surrounded by three cops simply for holding a can of booze, this felt thrillingly hedonistic. I remember most summers in London as a hazy blur of parks and heat and joy. They’re the smell of cigarettes and the taste of Aperol Spritz. Nights that never end, until they do.
Things peaked, or sank, in the summer of 2018. As the city started blooming with flowers and shorts, I went on a run through a park. Halfway through I felt a slight twinge in my hip, and after a month of crescendoing agony, I was diagnosed with a hip fracture. This is, apparently, an extremely common injury for women over the age of 75. I was 25. But I’d waded through the months of cold and 3pm darkness, developed a vitamin deficiency and seasonal depression, and a little split in my bones wouldn’t stop me now. So I threw myself into summer with the brute force of a raging bull.
I watched Charli xcx play a gig in a basement, swaying on one leg while the girls and the gays battered me from all sides. England made it to the semi-finals of the World Cup and it was like I was born and bred there; screaming at TVs in sardined pubs, discovering the armband of a crutch is the perfect cupholder for a plastic pint of lager. I crutched to a festival in Victoria Park, drank through the pain, climbed on the shoulders of a stranger and had my crutches stolen. The next day, I limped to a shop, bought another pair, then took the train to another festival to watch Good Charlotte.
The fracture was meant to take six weeks to heal. It took six months. Obviously I was depressed, in a circumstantial way – many of those circumstances being my own fault. But the bone reformed eventually. The partying continued. Two years later, Covid hit and I moved home to New Zealand with two days' notice. There wasn’t time to say goodbye. To the city, to anyone.
I didn’t want to move back. I had booked a return flight to London two months later, by which time I assumed the pandemic would’ve all but blown over. It didn’t, so I stayed, and by the time everything settled and we were allowed to leave the house again, I still mourned the life I’d built in a big city, even if it resembled a game of Jenga. I Facetimed my flatmate in London who, with the patience of a kindergarten teacher, packed up my room as I instructed her through a phone screen which of my belongings to get rid of, and which to put in a box that would be shipped home. I changed my sim card to a New Zealand one, inadvertently locking myself out of my old WhatsApp and cutting off all the old groups I was part of, many of whom I’ve now lost touch with. I cried a lot.
It’s easy to feel like you’re going backwards when you move home. This is exacerbated by conversations littered with ‘why did you leave?’ ‘you were doing so well?’ ‘when will you go back?’ A lot of New Zealanders have a complex that everything is better out there, one I subscribed to for many years. Ironically, lots of people out there have a complex that everything is better in New Zealand. But we currently have a government stifling indigenous rights, trying to fast track seabed mining and giving landlords massive tax cuts, so I’d think twice before heralding us as some green utopia. And while heaven isn’t a little country at the bottom of the world, and while I still get jealous of my old self sometimes, still feel like I’ve fallen behind, I’ve also come to love the life I’ve carved out here. It’s a little more calm, for one.
My 20-something self would be sick. Back then I believed that people only came back to New Zealand to do boring things like find a partner and have a baby and save money. The nightlife is dead and all the restaurants close by nine. Some of those things are true; the nightlife is dead and the restaurants close by nine and I’ve got a boyfriend and savings for the first time in my life.
The thing I didn’t realise was that not all of those things are bad. They might not be what you want when you’re 20, but what I’ve come to know and like about getting older is the changing shape of what you want. I remember dreading the notion that you’re not supposed to party as much later in life; the idea that hangovers start to stretch from a day to a week in your ‘old’ 30-something body. That you’re meant to be a bit more sensible with money. Spend more time with family. Learn how to pot a plant. Buy a good quality mattress. Get really into vacuums. It all sounds so boring when you don’t want it. It’s all quite nice when you do.
Recently I moved into a flat with my boyfriend – our own place, not a cramped room in a five-person house. Five years ago, this would’ve made my stomach curdle. Moving in with a man in New Zealand, connotations of settling down, expectations of marriage or motherhood, hell in one bed flat. I realise now it doesn’t have to come with all the baggage I associated with turning 30 and not wanting to party as much. I just want to walk around naked, have an entire fridge to ourselves and not have to cram two lives into a 3x3 metre box.
Besides, I can still move back to London. Still quit my job and try on a new one. Still leave it all behind to run away to Argentina. And I can definitely still party with the best of them. I just don’t want to, all the time.
