So I think I've posted here before but my outlook has changed greatly recently and my previous posts on the forum are not something I like to read. Do note, I bash my mother quite a lot in this, but only because I consider her salvageable, unlike my father. I am 19 as of writing this.

NOTE: If you want the tl;dr, jump to the last paragraph

The jist of my situation is that my life has been a downward spiral of parental alcoholism with loss of employment and I've been a bit of a grim person. During the last year my depression has slowly gotten worse and worse and I turned to drink to escape. It also helped me combat my insomnia and tinnitus. I drank more and more often as time went on. I never got much support from a lot of places. And so even with her alcoholism my mother was my last semblance of support for quite a while during the past year. She never knew I drank so much, mind you, which is quite an achievement while living at home.

That was until this new year when a bunch of stuff fell on me at once. Being already depressed, working a crummy temp job at a department store I hated, I ended my contract by getting a lot of flak due to reasons that weren't my fault, I was pressured to go to a family-friend new years party after a nine-hour shift I really didn't want to go to where my parents got so wasted they couldn't walk, forcing me to babysit them home and put them to bed. My mother in particular was extremely ashamed of it and apologised profusely, and things settled, but one week after this she got wasted at home and fell down the basement stairs in the middle of the night, forcing me to live through the nightmare I'd had for a long time of finding one of my parents' broken corpse one day somewhere in the house. Mercifully, she was fine, besides being completely hammered.

This really messed my head. My last support peg broke, and I started to mentally feel like I was paralysed while getting choked slowly. During January, which felt like three months instead of one to me, I basically started to get drunk every night in my room, ironically precisely repeating the bad habits of my mother. I ordered six bottles of hard liquor that arrived on the last week of January. I drank like, a fifth to a quarter of it all, along with other things during the one week. It didn't really help anymore and instead of numbing the pain like it used to I felt worse and worse. Then, last friday a couple of friends came for their weekly visit, they'd been around all this time, not really helpful for my issues though, and unaware of my drinking's extent. We had some beers while we spent the evening and eventually they saw the bottles. I was somewhat drunk by this point and as I recall it was a bit awkward and one of them said half-jokingly that I have a drinking problem. This fact was of course obvious to me. They left soon as it was late.

I then had a couple more beers and watched netflix until something snapped. I felt I couldn't take any of it anymore. I sat at my computer and put on some music and started googling around about suicide. I also cried, which I very rarely do, for about an hour. During all of my depressive periods my last protection has been how close I was to my mother, "at least she'd miss me", you know, but seeing how little she valued herself made all that fall apart. I thought about different ways to do it, how I'd be found, all that. I thought about calling a suicide hotline but didn't feel like they'd care anyway. I turned off my computer and took my tablet to bed and thought that if I just harness all my willpower to fall asleep without doing anything, just one night, I could talk to my mother and she'd help. It was like 4AM or something at this point so eventually I fell asleep.

I woke up the next day, still alive and told my mom all about how bad it'd gotten, except the drinking. I promised myself I wouldn't get drunk alone anymore and honestly, I was and still am terrified of what could happen next time. Sure enough, she came through, listened and gave me advice and hugged me and all those nice things. I also cried some more. My depression hasn't gone anywhere yet, but I'm taking small steps to ease back into life. Finding things to do, since all I did a week ago was stare blankly at the computer screen for the day until I could get wasted at night. I'm trying to take walks outside. I cook. I play games and the piano. And while my mood isn't all there yet, I have all this clarity all of a sudden. It no longer feels like I'm banging against the walls of my own head. Looking at who I was, what I said and did, it wasn't me. Hence "like waking up from a dream". More like a nightmare. I still can't sleep very well, but I've lost a lot of the urge to drink after the meltdown. I'm taking it one day at a time.

We'll see how it goes.