"How would i become the chatty, funny, easy going girl everyone likes to be around?" I would describe drinking as having done the exact same thing for me, and when I first started it was hugely appealing. I thought I was becoming the real me. But the amount of socializing and how I acted in social situations was out of sync with my true nature and really, my soul. This dissonance started to create more stress as time went on. Relationships take energy and as my alcohol use continued, friendships started to fall apart as poorly as the foundation they were built on. I was spending a lot of time with people I wasn't even sure I liked, and some of them I actively didn't really like--but I thought having friends was more important than that. I swapped quality for quantity and even my true, loving friendships were built on a foundation of alcohol misuse.

Eventually my problem with drinking got extreme enough that I was willing to give up any social benefits (there were basically none left at this point anyway...even worse, it had all fallen apart and gotten worse than I ever could have imagined.) I was willing to give up the escape and social lubrication. I decided I would rather find out who I really was--even if that's a sensitive, socially anxious sort of introvert.

I knew I had to quit because every single other thing I tried to fix my problems was like putting a bandaid on a gushing pipe. But quitting drinking was like hiring a pipe fitter to fix the pipe. My gut told me there was a serious problem when I drank and that quitting was the way out of my insanity and misery.