LogFAQs > #948186365

I got drunk - blackout wasted in spectacularly embarrassing fashion, actually - for the first time a few months shy of my 18th birthday and started binge drinking regularly the following year. I drank for over 13 years and the only reason I finally stopped is because it got so bad that the morning after my last bender, I found myself with a loaded gun and figured what that had to offer me was better than anything else I'd ever find. I don't know how I averted going through with it. I woke up later that day and the gun was put back in the safe, though I don't remember doing that. I reached out for help and found it in a bunch of different places that all added something to my toolbox that has kept me sober for almost 18 months now.

A lot of people don't really practice self-awareness in general, but with something like alcohol that is highly addictive and culturally encouraged, nobody has an incentive to look past the blind spot at their habits until it's too late and there's no denying they have a problem. Then, if they do, there's temptation and triggers everywhere on the path to sobriety.

The saddest part of it around here is that there have been people who openly expressed a desire to cut back or quit but their drinking buddies get ultra defensive, start picking apart anything that people trying to help have to say, and they lose their resolve. It's not an intentional thing but it really showed this crab mentality that I think a lot of drinkers really need, to the point that they subconsciously sabotage their friends. I've been on both sides of that, so I'm not judging but just speaking from experience and knowing it when I see it.

I had to tell all my buddies once and for all that I wouldn't be seeing them for a while. I took a break from parties, camping trips, and all of that while I worked on myself because I wouldn't be able to avoid temptation. I did all of this about 9 months prior to the pandemic and I still haven't seen anyone. It's been 18 months since I've seen my closest friends in person and it will likely be at least the two year mark before I see them again because I have to be supremely diligent about COVID-19 due to immunocompromised people in my family. My friends, fortunately, understood that. I was frank and honest with them about what sobriety means to me and more importantly, what drinking would do to me, and they understood.

To see someone reaching out for help here and openly expressing what drinking was doing to them, then having their friends come in and shit on this method or that method, talk about how important their drinking topics are and how they'd never give up that time spent together... it was heartbreaking and maddening.

I get it, man. I do. I know what it's like to have alcohol being what holds things together, or even being everything. But goddamn, it goes from harmless fun to scarily dangerous shit so fast and people just don't respect that. Hell, I sure didn't. My mom, who was around alcoholics starting very early in life, told me just months before my last drink that it catches up with you and you'll never see it coming. I scoffed and ignored her because I'd been drinking at the same pace for over a decade and it was all good. Never mind that that was untrue, never mind that it was a bad pace even if it had been true. It got so bad, so fast, and I never would've believed it had I not experienced it.

I see a lot of people flirting with disaster and I wish I could make people understand and respect it, but nobody could do that for me so I just have to let them do their thing and hope for the best.

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