Tried drinking and now I’m more confused than ever

I tried drinking for the first time a few nights ago and I am so confused by what happened. (FYI I’m in my mid-30s, so it’s not like I’m a teenager, I have literally avoided this my whole life and I wanted to know what the big deal was finally!)

Basically, a friend invited me out and I was feeling kind of energetic so I was like sure, why not? I had a large can and a half of hard cider. It did make me feel more at ease in the bar setting, which I thought was pretty noisy and hard to have a conversation in. Oh yeah, I think yelling to talk gave me a headache and it might have made that go away a little lol.

That was really all I noticed, at first, anyway. My personality was basically the same. I’m a pretty unusual person so I took being in a bar and drinking as its own excuse to let my guard down a bit more. I always felt fully in control, though.

Once we got up and moved to the patio to wait for our ride, I became hyperactive and had a hard time staying still. Then once we got back to their place I got kinda dizzy and had a hard time staying upright. Buuut I’ve also been working a lot of overtime and was going for an all-nighter, so I mightve had that coming, anyway.

As the night wore on I did get sleepy… I kept ping-ponging back and forth between feeling really restless and lucid and almost falling asleep.

Then I suddenly became REALLY lucid, noticed all the discarded seltzer cans my friend had littered the floor with and I was just like, f— this, I’m leaving. This is boring, people do this as a hobby?? This isn’t fun, I hate people, I’ll never understand them (my mood pretty much bottomed out at this point).

I think drinking just made me go a little crazy. 😅 I got home and still didn’t sleep well. And then I had horrible reaction I needed to see a doctor for so I can’t even try it again… I’ve become really interested now in learning more about alcohol, why do people drink it, the science of it. I kept asking my friend and he couldn’t explain, he had a totally different reaction to me and got drunk so much faster. He said it made him feel good, but for me, I kind of feel like that way most of the time (euphoric and spaced out, on my good days), so I am really struggling to make sense of this phenomenon, it is something that is clearly very important, but it didn’t do anything to me (or at least I couldn’t tell the difference).