Hello everyone,

I'm an alcoholic. I haven't been to AA and I am just starting a 30-day challenge to do no drinking to see how far I can go. But given everything I have read and seen, I can't imagine I don't check off the necessary boxes to qualify. I'm just too afraid to go to an AA meeting.

This is one of the worst days of my life, which I will explain below. So I have a lot of issues, but at this point starting in the Addiction forum makes the most sense.

I'm 50 and have been divorced for 8 years. My mother left my father when I was in junior high school and I never saw my father again.

I started drinking late in high school with a couple of wine coolers at a cast party for a play. I definitely felt the buzz but did not realize at the time it was priming me for dealing with my social fears that way. My first binge drinking was in college. After a semester of that, I stopped almost completely because I knew I would flunk out if I kept partying.

While married, I drank wine and cocktails and some beer but never, ever got into any trouble in those situations. But one time at a work party during those years, I had a couple of whiskey sodas and got borderline sloppy. My colleagues chuckled, but I stopped drinking and did not realize the bigger risks in that warning sign.

Fast-forward to after my divorce. I was a free man, so to speak. I immediately went to hang out with a friend and met a really pretty younger woman who was a bartender at my friend's local bar. She and I hit it off enough for her to say yes when I asked her out. We had a very nice, normal date. But it seems the sex/romance/approval issues mixed in with my alcohol predilection and I started to visit her bar to try to convince her to get with me in that way. Huge mistake. As a recent divorcée, I was ignorant of bar culture and did not know I was breaking one of the cardinal rules of bartending - don't hit on the bartenders (well, especially true of don't hit on the female bartenders) - even in bars where there is a lot of use of sex appeal to gain business, it is both harassing and could be even delusional to think that a bartender's behavior can be taken at face value like a romantic opening. She sensed this and starting flirting with other customers probably in an attempt to let me know that this was not the place to try make myself special to her.

One day I had drinks elsewhere and dropped in at her bar like a sad puppy. I had more beer, got weepy, and she said it isn't gonna happen. I didn't realize I had no money left so I couldn't even pay. My friend's brother was there and covered by beers for me. She also finally sent me a compassionate but very final text before going to no contact. But it was the first of several drinking related humiliations to come.

Over the next few years, I hit on a couple of other bartenders and servers while drunk, got various patrons angry at me - both females who did not appreciate my attention and guys who got annoyed by my general behavior. I did eventually date a woman for a few months, but a lot of that relationship was based on drinking too. And so was a longer, one-year relationship as well. The first woman went to no-contact because I kept texting her while drunk. And the latter woman would probably do the same but for some reason she has this almost unshakable need to stay in touch with everyone and not cut them off. But I have managed to piss her off by drunk texting as well.

For the past 3 or 4 years, though, I have not dated, have spent way too much on drinking and bars, and have grown increasingly isolated because I am ashamed at the things I have done. I have become a bar fly and although I have learned to leave the bartenders and patrons alone, mostly I end up alone in the bars, drinking too much, admiring the pretty women around me but usually too insecure to try to talk with them. All the while I feel I am doing nothing productive with my personal life. I did meet one woman who liked me back and we made out at the bar, but ironically that was probably the worst thing that could have happened to me by rewarding my risky behavior.

Most recently, I met a woman at a bar and we kind of hit it off. I didn't feel the erotic yearning the way I did with the previous women, but I decided to humor the guy friend I was with and ask her out. We did got out and, of course, both got drunk. But I was far more sloppy and don't even remember what I did to upset her. But she left me at the bar. Later when I texted her she replied that she had not appreciated my come-ons. I asked if I could meet her over coffee to apologize in person, but naturally even though she said she would got back to me she never texted back.

For the past few months I have switched to a new role at work that is particularly stressful and unpleasant, so I have gone out drinking more to self-medicate and have twice had to take a day off when hung over. I hate myself for it but did nothing to stop because I was terrified at the prospect of enduring my evenings at home sober.

Most recently, I culminated my long-term habit of having a second Instagram account to follow the tons of gorgeous, mostly naked women on there. It was a quasi-pornographic experience and excited me because in some cases they would like my comments or even respond to my DMs. Of course, along the way I discovered that this is a business for most of these pages, and they began asking me for money. Of course, while drunk I did agree to one of the offers, so you are starting to get the picture of why bad things happen when I drink.

What brought to me current crisis is a young lady I met last year while she was visiting from Australia. We met at some live music I went to with my friend. I was already almost drunk and later I found out she had done some drinking too. But there was real immediate chemistry not clouded by alcohol somewhere in there, so she agreed to exchange info for Instagram and we stayed loosely in touch for months.

And then....

I had sent her a couple of relatively tame messages, but one day last week, I got super drunk at the bar (like 10 beers). At some point after 6 beers, for me, I start to do things that I see myself doing but for the life of me I swear I would never think of doing while sober. I know, Captain Obvious. But please bear with me. So that night, for me, I was too inebriated to be considerate of the time difference, for starters. And for another, I know she had told me she had dated a guy who drank a lot, and one day she was so sick she had to go to the hospital and he got drunk instead of going to see her.

While I was busy being oblivious to all of those warnings, I began a string of really sexual messages to her and even sent some pornographic videos from sites I had been watching while messaging her from home.

Eventually I passed out and woke up to messages from her saying things were busy at work and also never to send her porn again. I was immediately ashamed and remorseful. But even that did not stop me. It was all part of the downward spiral because I also felt so guilty that I could not just let the messaging cool off. I kept sending her apologies, and that caused things to get "meta," talking about this incipient proto-relationship. I immediately fell into shock and fear as I saw my dreams and plans of being with her crumbling before my eyes. After I messaged her drunk yet again, she told me she no longer felt the same way she had before.

At some point over the next day or so, I messaged her one last time on Instagram, after which she disappeared from there and from WhatsApp. That brings me to today.

I did cry a lot when that first (bartender) woman rejected me. But that woman never expressed open sexual interest in me or was willing to have me travel across the world to meet her. So for me to have gone so long without learning the lessons, and to do so through 100 percent my fault in a case where the woman really liked me, has made me feel completely sick with regret and self-hate. It's not like before where I could switch to other things to do or women to be interested in. This time makes me feel that I am the one who can repel even the most interested woman within a matter of days. I have been crying off and on for the past two days and I see no relief in sight from any "rebound" or other woman. Because it has never been more stark that this issue is emanating from me, not from anyone else. Also, even though I intellectually understand why women need to go to no contact in these cases, it feels so brutally final to me that I get physical symptoms from the rejection and feeling of abandonment. This episode is especially bad.

I'm not saying I don't have to quit alcohol. That much is obvious. But now I feel it's deeper than that, and that even sober I have a porn problem, and on top of that some kind of self-defeating behavior patterns that make me keep messing up when I get a chance to date a woman. I also have an aversion to being home alone, cooking alone, eating alone - perhaps due to shame at the neighborhood I live in, or loneliness, or both. I've never had any of my friends over to my apartment. I always feel an uncomfortable restlessness to not be home. Not to be too hyperbolic, but I feel trapped at home and forced to focus on my extremely lonely life and self-hating thoughts.

I have rarely felt worse. That self-hate is compounded by the fact that I feel stupid and incompetent almost every day at work due to the increased complexity of the work that I am now doing. The work was hard before, but I was familiar with it. Now every day is a new task which I have never seen before. It all has made me completely paralyzed as to how to cope with this in any kind of healthy way.

I know I don't have a sympathetic story, it involves engaging in very inappropriate and hurtful behavior towards women who initially must think I am nice and harmless. For example, the Australian young woman posted an Instagram poll about people's worst dates. One woman answered something like: "He arranged a NYE date and got drunk. He invited me home and passed out and I had sex with his house mate on the kitchen bench. I was the bad date." That answer actually enraged me, although at that point she had already blocked me so the rage was all in my head. So clearly I have a severe anger problem about women and sex as well. Some days I think I have some odd strain of Antisocial Personality Disorder - APD with remorse. I fear that each time I somehow am able to catch the interest of a woman whom I also like, I will almost immediately drive her away with some kind of crazy perverted outburst. And even if I avoid that by not drinking, I feel it is lurking in me like Mr. Hyde.

Well, that is the long-winded nutshell. I don't even know where to start, but perhaps someone can help me.