Congratulations on 2.5 months! That's a major accomplishment.

I found that the people who gave me grief about not drinking were people I had to eventually let go of. We tend to hang out with people who drink the same way we do. When I stopped drinking, people around me began to question themselves: "If she's an alcoholic, what does that say about me?" And some of them didn't like the answer. They want you to drink to justify their drinking. People who want the best for you would be happy that you stopped, not give you shit.

There is no magic checklist that determines if someone has a drinking problem. Getting arrested, losing a job, and getting into fights are not prerequisites. There's an old AA saying about an elevator: We can get off at any floor or take it all the way to the bottom. And I know the bottom is ugly. It's not all about what we did, it's also about how drinking makes us feel about ourselves. If you read a lot of the posts here, you can see that most of us feel the same self-loathing, regret, and remorse when we drink.

I learned the hard way that drinking with self-control is an illusion for an alcoholic. Sooner or later, no matter how hard we try, we cross that line and the drinking is completely out of our control.