Abstinent in A transparent lockbox

It is the season of getting drunk with the family. I have been sober since July. I tend to do the extremes in life, in that I am all or nothing. There have been too many moments of embarrassment caused by drinking for me to justify it in any sense. There are three stories that I’m just going to give a sentence or two to summarize. One, I was at a wedding of family friends, didn’t eat, and kept drinking till I was passed out and vomiting on the back deck of this house that the party was at. Two, my sister went through a breakup with her boyfriend and went to a hotel so she wouldn’t have to explain it to our parents just yet, and I filled my bag with shooters of vodka so I wouldn’t have to waste as much at the bar and could drink at the hotel. Three, this one is the most disgusting for so many reasons. I had been very casually dating a guy and this was maybe my fourth time hanging out with him and we were just drinking rum and cokes at his house and chatting. Once again, I didn’t eat and ended up excruciatingly drunk and vomited in his basement. That was the last time I drank. And that one isn’t just embarrassment, though I did drunkenly say “love you” because he let me rest my head on his knee. When I sobered up I remembered the conversations from the night before as my head rested on his lap about how he had a fear that he could become a villain because he is scared of what he thinks he may be capable of doing. This was a big man, he was pumped full of steroids, and I was completely unprotected. He didn’t even know what he was capable of, and I was drunk and startlingly vulnerable.
That whole situation hit me so intensely once I realized how stupid I was. All that ran through my head was “I could have been raped” or “He could’ve hurt me”. I never did see him again after that, largely cause of that night and partially because it did come to light that he wasn’t an overly pleasant person and had a reputation for complaining if you wouldn’t “put out” and only seeking out people between 18 and 25 despite being mid-thirties. Shockingly I wasn’t embarrassed about vomiting in his basement, just that I put myself in such a vulnerable situation.
The hangover the next day was so fucking vicious it definitely contributed to quitting. I was carrying around a large coffee cup in case I needed to vomit. But that was all just too much for me. Knowing what could’ve happened and that he wasn’t the man I thought he was. It was just so grounding to feel so stupid about what I was doing.
Quitting was tough too, I had been drinking nearly daily for months, and for about 2 weeks after quitting, I had tics and would get whiplash and fuck up my neck from it. Just looking back to last winter and spring, I cannot believe the way I was living. Rolling into my classes hungover and on Ativan so I wouldn’t be anxious that I wasn’t drunk, blowing hundreds on liquor each week, and never thinking about who I was or anything at all. I also haven’t been on any dates since, but that’s largely from disinterest.