Hi Alev and welcome to the board. Wow, where to begin? Speaking from personal experience, I was very self destructive at that age. I didn't really see it that way, I just thought I was having fun. I wanted to achieve goals but I was sabotaging my success by partying. It's really easy to do because alcohol numbs your feelings so much that everything just goes away, the shame, the guilt, the pain. It's easy to just say F it and get drunk. The hard thing to do is take stock of your priorities, make a schedule and stick to it. Well that would be easy if drinking was only a decision and you could just decide not to drink on certain nights but if you're crying about the thought of not drinking on a week night then you might be in the right place. Changing schools isn't going to help, there's always someone that will drink with us no matter where we go. But the next day, those might not be the people that we would count on as friends. Sounds like you're in a big school, chances are that there are AA meetings on campus, or very near by. You can look up AA in your phone book and ask where some meetings are. You can also ask if someone will take you to one. It's worth a shot, if you are looking for a solution. If you have some questions about getting sober or how the program works, ask away that's what we're here for.

Dean







-- Edited by StPeteDean at 20:43, 2008-02-28

Hi Alev,
Awww to be young, where we "think" life is infinite. Alot of us made choices in our youth
only realize that there are far more important things in life than alcohol. We wake up one day look in the mirror and it OMG is that really me?! Okay.....this is coming from the voice of experience who had to learn some things the hardway because she would not take
the advice given.
In our youth "alcohol" seems like the thing to do. I agree with Dean the buddies that
will be with you tonight (or anytime you're drinking) probably won't be your best friend(s)
when there comes those times in your life you REALLY need a friend.
What comes to mind at present are the numerous singers and movie stars that are making the headlines right now. It would seem they have it all. Yet behinds the scenes
inside those minds things are going on that are leading each of them down that path of destruction. They for whatever reason are choosing this path to mask fears, insecurities,
ect. And for many of them their names are being read in the obits long before they have REALLY experienced life.
On this board you'll find the name "Quetzal" aka Carol. Click on her name and it'll take
you to her profile page where you will see her wonderful website. There you'll find names
of very young women who "liked to party". Most of these have before/after pics of these
women along with their stories. It may very well help to SEE what the realities of drugs
and alcohol do.
I myself......in Dec. had to force myself to attend the funeral of a 26 yr.old nephew.
While suicide by hanging was listed as the cause of death what led up to it was a combination
of antidepressants and alcohol. I still go through times that all I can do is bawl. He was good looking, sooo funny, and to those closest to him he'd give the shirt of his back to help
them. His 6mos old son will NEVER know him except from what others tell him. I looked
around the room during the service and all I could think, "yes, you loved him. the Question
is, "Did you help him when he needed you most?" I could also not help but to wonder
among those young with tear stained eyes would be the next.
I know this sounds harsh. THESE ARE THE REALITIES OF ALCOHOL.
We are here for you if you simply need to keep sharing your thoughts throughout the
night until this urge passes.
Will keep you in my thoughts and pray you'll listen to the sage advice and wisdom of
what is being said.
With love,
wanda

I called and cancelled. It was painful, especially because a few seconds before I called her I got a text from a different friend asking me what I was doing and telling me she was gonna find somewhere to drink (Thirsty Thursday is a time-honored institution here), but I didn't end up going, so at least I accomplished that.

If I'm being honest I agree that it is the alcohol rather than the school that is dictating my drinking habits.

I had to withdraw here first semester. A couple of weeks before the semester ended it was clear I couldn't do any more work so now I am technically in my first semester, though I've been here since September. The official reason I gave the administration was that the number and dosages of the medications I was on kept changing, which was true, and therefore that my brain chemistry was off and doing work became impossible.

However, the reason we had to keep changing the medications was because my 3 nights a week average of heavy drinking was throwing all of the medications completely out of whack, so we had to keep adding new ones and lowering/raising dosages. (These were mood stabilizers.) I stopped drinking over winter break because I didn't go out and I got down to only one medication, which I guess is telling--without drinking for six weeks, the one medication I really needed worked fine, and I didn't need all the others to help it work.

So alcohol was the reason I withdrew, although I hate to admit, I felt like the medication was interfering with my alcohol consumption and not the other way around.

Learning--I think I will go on that website. I can't imagine myself getting older, period, let alone that my alcohol consumption will affect how my aging goes. Logically it makes sense but I just can't process it.

There is an AA meeting every Monday at 5:30 down the street from my dorm. A few weeks ago I went down there half an hour early to make sure I could find the building--I was all set to go, though it felt surreal and I was extremely nervous. I made it to the meeting place, which was a bungalow turned substance abuse treatment center, but I left once I saw the building. It looked so sad. It looked like a place where you would go when you hit rock bottom, which of course it is for most of its residents.

I've been thinking about going back though, because every day I'm that much closer to rock bottom, so I might as well pre-empt it.

*edit* My introduction to alcohol, by the way, was binge drinking by myself on whatever was already open in my parent's liquor cabinet and the bottle of Absolut in the freezer. I had to be hospitalized once for alcohol poisoning on a Sunday night my junior year of high school. My parents keep a dry house now.

Thanks for these replies--it's so helpful to hear from people who have lived through this.

-- Edited by alev430 at 00:06, 2008-02-29

alev, it sounds like you are where I was at in life some years back......... please read my story here that i shared last week.... the link for it is http://www.activeboard.com/forum.spark?forumID=42735&p=3&topicID=15635798

I hope you will not have to go through all that i have gone through. And i am so so glad that you are here posting, letting out your feelings, thoughts and fears, because that is a very healthy thing to do at this point!! Welcome.

Joni

Hi Alev,
Congrats for cancelling and deciding not to drink last night. That's all that we do. We make a decision not to drink today. Then we get up again tomorrow and make that decision not to drink that day one day at a time. You mentioned that from the begining (of your drinking) that you binged on your parents alcohol and that one time you got sick. That's a common thread amongst us here, that we have realized we never could have just one or two drinks. that somehow we had a reaction to alcohol that we couldn't control.  The first time I drank, in 8th grade, I was at a party. I sat down in this back yard with a school mate next to the 10 cases of beer and drank 12 or more. we each had a pile of bottles and lost count. I got drunk and I got a serious case of alcohol poisoning. It wasn't too fun at 12 years old to be sick and hungover, but you know my parents never said anything to me. I guess they thought it was just what kids do, unbelievable, but then again both my parents were alcoholics (which isn't a prerequisite but it certainly didn't give me much of a chance genetically). My point is that we believe that most of us are genetically or otherwise predisposed to be alcoholics and that we don't have the ability to process alcohol like "normal" people do. Not that there are a lot of occasional drinkers in college but if you look around you'll see some people that can have one or two drinks and a lot of people that don't drink at all. They are hard to see because there busy doing other things, look hard they are there. Your roomate might be one of them.

You are fortunate that at this point you've only been drinking a few days a week. Alcoholism is a progressive disease and it gets worse over time. It took awhile before I was a daily drinker but in the mean time, I wasted any opportunity that I had to go to college by not finishing my senior year of high school. I felt quite a bit of shame about that but quickly got to work in the constuction industry where drinking was acceptable and amazingly I lost very few jobs to missing work from hangovers. College isn't that forgiving. You've got such a great opportunity, it's truley a blessing all the way around and that window of opportunity can close. And drinking will be right there for you to ease the pain of it in a bond that could last a lifetime. Oh It would be easy for you to "compare out" and tell yourself that it's "not that bad". That is a challenge for our younger members to listen to older people talk about losses ect.. But we look at you and say "I wish I could've gotten sober then". Fortuanately for you there are a lot of young people in AA these days and you're in the right place to find them and listen to how they changed their life for the better.

I went to my first AA meeting when I was 15 and another when I was 17 but unfortunately I didn't accept that I was an alcoholic (or wish to do anything about it) till I was 27 when my sone was born. Then I went to AA meetings steadily for 2 years and couldn't stay sober. Finally at age 29, after my marriage was over, I was willing to do whatever it took to get and stay sober. I could write a couple of books on what happened in those 14 lost years. Sure I had a some fun times but with an IQ of 135 and an sat score of 1300 (for someone who rarely did homework or attendent class toward the end) it was just an aweful waste of potential. I am a contractor now and am very happy with what I do, but my customers are generally very successful and I envy them sometimes because I know that I could've done a lot more with what I had to work with. I dream of going to college after I retire just to get a degree. How dumb is that?

Alev, don't waste your life. Get a grip on this thing. In here we learn what makes us "tick" and why we are so inclined to drink and self destruct. I hope you'll join us. Check out that meeting. You'll find some happy people there, that are free to do what ever they want without the bonds that alcohol had once placed on them. Let us know how that meeting was. Check out these links to Young peoples groups in AA, there's a lot going on and probably near you.  There's lists of meetings for young people and activities, they have a lot of fun.  http://www.theagapecenter.com/AA/YoungPeopleInAA.htm

http://www.icypaa.org/

Dean


-- Edited by StPeteDean at 07:01, 2008-02-29

-- Edited by StPeteDean at 07:13, 2008-02-29