The Happiness Hangover

The kind of lightness that lingers in your bones and reminds you of who you were

Apr 28, 2025

That’s me, top center. Love these chicks.

He came onto stage, bare-chested. Second-skin black leather pants. Red bandana tied around his long blonde hair.

The frenzied energy rose up from floor to stage. The guitar riffed.

“She’s got a smile, that it seems to me, reminds me of childhood memories, where everything was as fresh as the bright blue sky-yy,” he sang.

A three-tiered venue of middle-aged, neon-clad people chanted along. I was one of them.

Where Can I Find a Woman Like That?

I often ~~complain~~ write about not having a large collection of local friends, even after living in my town for nearly 20 years. Somehow, as an adult, it’s been difficult for me to forge deep, lasting friendships to rely on come hell or high water. And it bugs me.

After talking honestly about it right here on Substack, many other women have come forth and shared similar feelings: they, too, struggle to develop strong adult friendships with staying power. They say they’re more likely to find “their people” online. Like me, they lean on old, geographically-challenged friendships.

When the group chat named Jessie’s Girls, began, there were 12 people. It grew until 27 of my college sorority sisters had tickets in hand for an 80’s tribute band concert.

We met up for a very delicious, very loud pre-arranged dinner ahead of time (and bought drinks for all the tables seated around us). If not for an intestinal virus or immovable family events, we’d easily have been a group of 30+.

This tells me two things:

I’m lucky as hell to have had such a fantastic collection of girls to know and grow with in college, and
We’re all craving a reconnection to friendships that are established, solid, and real.

Time and distance is irrelevant

Here’s how I know our souls are immortal:

As I stood in The Paramount, singing and dancing to hits from Madonna, Queen, and Cyndi Lauper, I time-travelled back to Hofstra USA. That was the name of the dance club/bar on my alma mater’s campus where students met up multiple times a week to drink cheap tap beer from clear plastic cups and dance until we sweat it all out.

Hofstra USA 2.0

I looked around the room and saw hundreds of teenagers in 50-year-old bodies. The music was our DeLorean. We flew back in time. We knew all the words. We shook our hips and jumped around, circled up, and giggled at our own joy.

No time had passed.

No amount of work, kids, spouses, mortgages…

We were our former selves. And. It. Was. Glorious.

There’s a certain amount of glee I feel when I see my old friends. Maybe it’s because I have a solitary job where I work alone most days. But I think it’s deeper than that. My old friends and I chose each other. Of the thousands of people we could’ve connected with in college, we found our tribe, and more importantly, we held on.

We held on since before cell phones and texts were possible.

We held on since before Facebook and the other socials.

We called. We wrote. We gathered. We held on.

Remembering

Decades have rolled by, but the memories are carved in stone.

There’s no pretense among us. I couldn’t care less what home they live in or car they drive—and I’ll probably never know since we generally meet on neutral ground. We come from a place where we used to pool money for a tank of gas. We knew each before the masks of adulthood.

Unlike trying to remember where the hell we put our keys or whether or not we shut the coffee pot, we effortlessly remember each other. We bonded before our prefrontal cortexes sealed shut, and though I have no scientific proof of this, I think that timing inked us into each other’s core memories.

I’m not suggesting every single girl in our sorority went together like peanut butter and jelly. But the ones who show up to events like this do so because they agree we had (and continue to have) something special.

Being together pauses our daily life stuff and taps back into the understanding of why we’re friends, have been, and always will be, despite time and distance.

We danced. We sang. We shared Advil (not even kidding.) We fanned each other’s hot flashes and cracked up about the ridiculousness of it.

When the house lights came up, we were spotted.

“Hey! I know you,” a thin-faced woman said, pointing in the face of one of my more sassy friends. Later, my friend would laugh and say, I was like, ‘What, am I gonna need to fight this girl?’ (If you knew her, you’d laugh, too.)

The pointing woman wasn’t part of our group of 27. Her four friends came over as several of mine did, too. “Ohhh, myyyy, Goddd!” someone shrieked and then jumped. It might’ve been me.

These girls were sisters from our rival sorority! (I say rival because we both competed to recruit the same girls, to win “Greek Week” sporting events, and, of course, for the cutest boys.) They were a the concert celebrating a 50th birthday.

From the deep recesses of my unconscious brain, I exclaimed, “Gadget?!”, her sorority pledge name, and lunged to hug my old friend, Amy, whom I haven’t laid eyes on since my 1995 dorm move-out. “Holy shit!!! What are the chances!?” We pulled back and just stared at each other, taking it all in.

As the impromptu reunion unfolded, the security guard pushed us out to the street with threats to call the cops if we didn’t vacate. Most of us plus the 5 of them crammed onto and around a 4-seater bench and asked a stranger to take a photo. If ever there was a chance of me getting into our college alumni magazine, this was it.

We exchanged numbers, said our goodbyes, and 10 of us walked a windblown block to a pizzeria that was still open at midnight.

I mean, what says alumni magazine more than this gem?

Two pies and two booths.

We piled in and devoured piping hot slices right out of the boxes. Some of us added a heaping handful of cold mozzarella on top—exactly the way the pizzeria near our college served it to drunk coeds at 2am.

Steal this idea: Open pizzerias near every college campus. Call it Midnight Pizza. Open from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. Gold mine. You heard it here first.

I was the designated driver and carted five of us home. Despite it being 2 a.m., I was too wired to conk out. Eventually I nodded off, dreamless.

The next morning, I should’ve been exhausted, but I actually wasn’t. I was definitely hoarse from scream-singing all night. But my body had absorbed so much fun, so much energy, so many happy feelings that I was riding high on a happiness hangover.

Over bagels, we chatted about the night. Girls had come from CT, RI, NJ, and even VA! We swore we’d do it again.

The photos and videos and texts started flying.