Drinking makes me angry

Thank you for making this post yourself, I was considering doing something along this line soon. I hate alcohol, in basically every way, with an intense passion. More than anything though, I hate the culture surrounding it. I work as a cashier at a grocery store and every other person is always coming through my lane with six enormous bottles of booze. If an old lady accidentally leaves behind a bottle of wine and I remind her about it, she always thanks me for reminding her that she left behind "the most important thing". Pop culture doesn't even glorify alcoholism in a way that could make people aware that that's a bad thing, it just lets it be the butt of jokes so no one ever questions the fact that it's there, even though it ruins lives constantly. "Not everyone who drinks is an alcoholic". Yeah, fine, but that doesn't change the fact I have never in my life heard "I would like a drink", only ever "I need a drink". I don't know why I get this way about it because the part of me that thinks with facts can never fully commit itself to the idea that people who drink are lesser than people who don't because that's just straight up not fucking true, but I can't help but feel it.

I have drank exactly five times. At least two of them were because I felt pressured into it, and they are the only times I can ever distinctly recall being successfully pressured into doing something I didn't want to. All five of them were awful experiences. I never want to again.

On your average day, this doesn't bother me that much. But my 21st birthday is coming up soon, and I have never dreaded a day of my life more heavily than that. I don't have a lot of contact with the people who know me because I live alone, and pretty far away from most of my friends, and I absolutely never talk to my family. None of them realize how much I despise alcohol. None of them are going to realize that they're comments about how I'm finally old enough to drink are not appreciated in the slightest. If I actually do tell any of them, none of them will know that it's severe enough that their jokingly shocked response will be offensive enough to actually make me cut ties with them completely. I don't care that I'm turning 21 soon, I hate alcohol. I don't care that I live near a famous brewery, I will never visit it. I don't care that I live in Michigan and could have driven to Canada to get legal drinks when I turned 19, I didn't fucking want to. I don't care that my parents are moving to Japan and we're at an exclusively family party, I don't want a beer. I don't care that we're visiting my parents in Japan and the drinking age is lower, I don't want any fucking sake. I don't care that you're my brother and you live across the country and I haven't seen you in months, we are not splitting a bottle of champagne when you come to visit.

The worst part of it all is that my ex-alcoholic girlfriend of two years has her 21st birthday the day before mine. How the fuck am I going to be able to keep calm about that? How can I possibly sit there quietly with a smile on my face, when all I can think about is all the different ways that our relationship could fall apart as a result of this?

/r/Anger Thread