Couldn’t think of a decent title, sorry.

My work Christmas party is tomorrow.

Yes, they scheduled it on a Wednesday.

I want to go. The difficulty is explaining to my family that I want to go.

There is the possibility of going there and not drinking. But let’s be honest, there’s no way of proving that I wasn’t drinking, so I might as well.

I have had a lot of trouble with alcohol, in the past.

I had a massive mental health crisis in April/May. I went WAYYY out of control with the alcohol. I went missing, and my family flew all the way to a different city to find me.

I was heavily drinking regularly. The first time I ever had more than two drinks? My work Christmas party, just five months earlier.

When I think about drinking, I think about my nieces and nephew. “My kids”. Even though they’re not really mine, I’ve been more involved in their lives than probably a lot of uncles are.

It was a crisis, it happens, but I did kind of abandon them by drinking and thereby going missing.

When my sister found me, she said “the night you went missing, your nephew was waiting for you. He was going to sleep over.”

I’d like to think I made it up to him, but it sucks. They’re a big marker for me to ask the question “is drinking or even putting myself in that position worth it?”

You have to live life and enjoy your adult self, and not think about your kids as bad as that sounds, but yeah.

To be perfectly honest, I’ll probably ask my colleagues whether I should go. They will say yes and I’ll probably end up going too, but not sure.