Has anyone quit drinking alcohol, and how did it affect their life and relationships?

quit 10 years ago, I was in a pretty rough place, even though from the outside i seemed mostly fine, (if a little chaotic/party animal) but it was really impacting my health & ability to retain relationships or even be present. I had gone sober for six months prior & was like "see I can do it I don't have a problem" & ended up back on it, eventually getting palpitations by lunch if I didn't get a drink in me (thought it was just panic attacks because I never disclosed my drinking to professionals) which is a very good indication of physical dependence. I also ran out of booze once & experienced DTs - hallucinations, fever, brain zaps, sweating, pain like you wouldn't believe - DTs are really fucking dangerous, basically there's a thing called kindling where your brain CAN repair itself but each time it does it breaks worse & is harder to repair the next time so detoxing once is bad but the next time will be worse. It's one of the few drug withdrawals you can die from (others are more physically unpleasant but). I just kinda stopped drinking one new years for no real reason, didn't have a moment of clarity I was just sick for a while & stopped wanting to drink. Wrote a poem about being sober & my friend recorded me performing it. I ended up on a two week long bender in April ish, my logic being my friend who I drank with was coming down & I wanted to train myself up to be at the same level (junkie logic is fucking dumb I know) ended up in a bath tub drinking whiskey with his passed out body & my other friend messaged me to say the poem was going out on his YouTube channel & I just thought "ahh fuck I can't be on here saying I'm sober when irl I'm not" & stopped again, luckily I hadn't got to the stage of physical dependence again & was able to keep it up this time. I work on the opposite logic of AA, I tell myself I'll have a drink tomorrow or just go "oh yeah Ill get a year sober then see, aw yeah I'll get two years, a decade etc" There were a couple of people who were dicks about it, I had to cut off my friend & not see him for a couple years because I was really scared that we wouldn't have a connection without booze (we did, I was worried for nothing but I do think that distance made it easier for me), a couple of folk were just like "oh come on, one beer can't hurt" but overall people were relieved that I wasn't killing myself & that's when my moment of clarity hit - most of my friends weren't enabling me but just knew telling me what to do would have no effect & so had to suffer through my addiction with this charade of fun I was trying to cultivate. I built myself a community in poetry & always joke that though I don't do AA I sure do spend a lot of time in dark rooms talking about my feelings. nearly a decade later it IS better, I'm healthier, I've managed to maintain relationships, build better boundaries & help out other friends struggling with addiction. It's weird cos you do have to rebuild yourself & catch up a lot, I had a shit tonne of debt which I've only just cleared, I didn't do any maturing during my 12 years of problem drinking so I came out like a 14 year old & had this strange sense of delayed maturity, other people were further ahead than me & I had a shit tonne to learn not least how to navigate just about EVERYTHING with very little framework. I still messed up & hurt people by not being as good as they deserved even during my recovery but compared to the damage I caused when drinking it's a lot more forgivable. Theres stuff that happened when I was younger that I can't make amends for & can only work on being a better person. I've done therapy & if not come to terms with it, at least managed to not despise myself for who I was. It's challenging but it is far better though I wish that I _could_ drink, I would love a cold cider on the harbour with the bois but one is simultaneously not enough & too much & I care far more about the people in my life to do it again. Sometimes I worry that something irrevocably shit will happen & I'll escape to the bottle again but I make sure that's a possibility I plan for rather than just pretend it'll never happen. There's still some things that I find difficult but I've done a shit load of really cool stuff that I never would have done otherwise, hell I even wrote a book about addiction & seeing as my dream as a kid was to be a writer it feels like I'm doing stuff for the person I was as much as the person I want to be so I'm glad of giving it up.