re: For people on here that got sober what was the final straw?

For me it was the fricking hangovers. Back when i was young they didnt exist. Now if i get drunk on a friday i aint doing shite for 2 days. Also possible my hard drinking and smoking made my cancer become worse. Now i dont smoke and i rarely drink.

I set a reminder on Alexa to bump this thread in 104 days to check up on you. Good luck, OP!

I drank heavily for over 20 years. Started at college and never stopped, didn't help that when i started drinking it was always a binge to blackout. I must have drank tens of thousands of dollars away through the years. To skip the party days, I wound up with a shitton of student loan debt and never really had a good job to pay it off. I was living in BR and fell behind because loans + apartment + booze was more than my paycheck. So i did the logical thing and gave up my apartment and began trucking cross country. Fast forward a few years and suddenly i just started getting tired of it. I was going to bars all over the country and knew nobody there, getting drunk as hell five or six nights a week and pissing away all of my money. I have been in bars in nearly every state in the country and a few provinces, never really remembering much of it. I remember one night I went to Erin's in Hubbard, OH and not only did the bartender know who I was and what I drank, three of the locals there knew who I was too. A light bulb kinda went off that night that this was pretty pathetic. I've always battled depression through the years and for the last 5 years that I was drinking it was a really rough patch. But for some reason that night really just shook me to my core that I had to change, that I needed to get my life together because the depression was eating me alive and waking up hungover covered in puke wasn't helping me at all. It took a little longer for me to get going with it because an addict is an addict. The last time I drank I was in Grand Island, NE on Mardi Gras day. Deperessed as hell that I was a thousand miles from home while everyone was posting party pics on social media. So I must have rung up a $200 bar tab that night. I went under in the bank account.

The next morning I woke up covered in puke and piss, went inside the truck stop to get a shower. As I was in line to check out a shower room an ad for A.A. came on the tv behind the cashier. I stood there watching it knowing that I needed help. There was a priest behind me and he put 2 and 2 together to realize this dude smelling like complete shite is eyeballing the AA commercial. So he offered to drive me to a meeting after I showered, and I felt like I was at my lowest point ever in my life so I accepted. Everything else in my life had gone wrong, why not try it.

That was Ash Wednesday 2019, and that was my first day sober. It has been 457 days since that day and I haven't picked up a drink since. The cravings are always there, sure. But its like I have more than just willpower on my side now and it gets me through the tough times. The first few days were horrendous with shaking, thin nerves, vomiting, the typical withdrawals. I didn't go to rehab but I probably should have. I didn't get much sleep for a week because my brain had this new thing called anxiety to deal with - something I had always drank away.

Little over a year later, and I feel like a completely new man. Debt is coming down, friends and family seem to be trusting me again, and I just have a more positive outlook. If you really want some help, give A.A. a shot after rehab - they'll probably introduce you to it at the center. There's a ton of resources out there to get you through it all - podcasts, seminars, weekend events, etc. What you give of yourself to it is what you get back.