Amazing accomplishment. You should be very proud!
Sounds like you’re a LOT more self-aware and analytical than about 99% of people who have a problem with alcohol. If you haven’t yet, pat yourself on the back for recognizing the issue at a young age, well before you did anything tragic.
Some years back, I visited a friend from when we lived in North Carolina. She’s about 10 years older than I am. She was dating someone new. I asked how she’d met him - and she said she met him at an AA meeting. I was shocked, and said I had never thought she drank to excess (certainly never around me, and we were close neighbors so I saw her a lot).
She said that she’d come home from her job (a nurse at an adolescent psych unit at a hospital - so kinda stressful) and have one or two glasses of wine every day. Which isn’t a lot, really, but she said she realized how MUCH she was looking forward to that wine. Given that a lot of their patients had substance issues, I think she was extra twitchy about the topic, and this scared her into seeking help.
She told me something to the effect that every alcoholic has to “hit rock bottom” before they make the needed change - and that “rock bottom” is a very individual thing. For some, it’s when they can’t panhandle enough change to get a cheap bottle of wine to drink at home behind the dumpster; for others it’s much sooner. I’m thankful for you that your rock bottom was “just” embarrassing yourself at a party.
The “staying awake” thing for my daughter was kind of funny in a way. We were actually up in Vermont visiting residential treatment places, with the very strong likelihood that she go into one immediately. And they quite rightly have zero-tolerance policies re alcohol even if you’re of legal age (when she returns from going out with us, sometimes they even breathalyze her). So she kinda wanted her “last hurrah” beforehand. She had drinks 3 times that week… and may have finished one.
I was fortunate that my parents never displayed any problematic alcohol behavior. Mom almost never drank - maybe once a year. Given that the aunt who died of liver failure was her sister, and two of her brothers had significant issues, I don’t know if her abstinence was to avoid going down that path, or if she genuinely didn’t like alcohol. My father had a couple of beers every evening when he was at home. He’d evidently had a past when he was a young man (a tale I heard of something he did when he went into the service in the early days of WWII involving a wrecked airplane!!). I never saw him obviously overindulging though. My brothers were quite a different story, evidently - only saw one of them drunk once but I know there were other times. He and his buddy had just turned 21, were given a bottle of something, finished it off, and I found him on the bathroom floor. Moron! OK, 21 year old male, moron, I guess that’s redundant :D.
Well done, EmilyG! You should be tremendously proud of yourself.
I’m nuanced, man. Em gets me.