I'M STRAIGHT (EDGE)
How a Tinder Date changed my life.
I first heard the term “Straight Edge” on a Tinder date in Copenhagen in 2017 during my second semester exchange. It was a time marked by freedom, loneliness, and the closest I’ve ever gotten to marijuana-induced psychosis. My mom remarked to my sister after visiting me that I looked like I was smoking more than I was eating. She was right.
I was going to Christiania, the former army base turned hippie commune turned free market for drugs, multiple times a week. I played backgammon in the park there way more than I went to my weekly lectures, so the fact that I passed those courses is a miracle.
The only thing I was doing more than smoking copious amounts of weed to avoid dealing with the first real bout of depression of my life was swiping Tinder. Fresh out of a relationship, I was going on many Tinder dates. In retrospect, it was really sad that at 20, in another country, I was using an app to meet people, but that’s what happened.
One of those Tinder dates introduced me to a concept I had never even considered: sobriety could be cool.
I was 21 and, up until then, the thought that anyone with cool taste, interesting ideas, or a compelling worldview could have no interest in drinking or doing drugs had honestly never occurred to me.
That notion was thrown out the window when I met Jenny.
She studied journalism, worked with women who were victims of domestic abuse, was vegan and boasted of making a killer tabbouleh, had hand-poke tattoos, and went to punk shows.
She was also straight edge.
Straight edge (often abbreviated sXe or marked with an “X”) is a subculture of hardcore punk that emerged in the early 1980s, advocating for a lifestyle of complete abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs.
You could be a punk and not be a fuck-up? That blew my mind.
That chance encounter one afternoon cycling around Copenhagen made me rethink my belief that teetotalling was uncool, and also led me to question my dependence on substances.
Maybe boozing wasn’t cool. That would certainly confirm the mountain of anecdotal evidence I’d been collecting.
Thinking back on that meeting now, having lived a straight edge life for over a year, makes me happy.
I was really unhappy back then, coping with the loneliness of being abroad and desperately seeking connection through the foundation of all my adolescent relationships: smoking weed and drinking beer. I thought that if I didn’t do those things, I wouldn’t have anyone to hang out with.
It took me a long time to fully commit to sobriety and, in my early 20s, it never really stuck. I kept slipping back into substance use in the name of old times’ sake, usually with the people I had formed those relationships with in the first place.
I think about this experiment I once read about where researchers gave a solitary rat the choice between heroin-laced water and normal water. The lonely rat kept going back to the heroin. But when they put two rats in a cage together with the same two options, neither of them touched the drug water.
The conclusion this strange and deeply cruel animal experiment reached was simple: animals with companionship wouldn’t use, but lonely animals would.
I was only able to get straight because I was in a loving relationship and had the support of my friends and family. My previous attempts at kicking the habit failed because I felt lonely and was using substances to self-soothe.
Maybe I just got all the drug fascination out of my system. I no longer saw it as shiny and cool. I saw it as hollow.
I read Anthony Kiedis’ Scar Tissue in high school and remember thinking: “this cycle of getting clean, only to relapse and then trying to get clean again — it’s so boring.”
Mac DeMarco spoke about not being beholden to things. That we already have enough we need just to survive: food, water, shelter. Adding substances to that list is just more weight to carry, more things to trap you and take away your freedom.
I’m no longer looking for more things to be beholden to.
The list is this: coffee, comedy, and comic books. That is what my 30s are going to look like.
Thanks, Jenny. Hope the rest of your trip was cool.