I'm a skinny woman. So numbers aside, I drank till I passed out/blacked out twice weekly by the end, drank enough to be drunk and then hung over a couple other nights. The days when I didn't drink were when I was still ill at the end of the day. I drank enough to fail out of my grad school program, permanently mess up several important relationships, and feel extreme frustration whenever I was in a situation where I couldn't drink. I stood at the point where I either needed to start drinking in the morning to function, or quit altogether. And then I came here, and then to AA
I'm glad I went the direction I did. I didn't go through physical withdrawal, but getting sober was hard enough without it.
You can decide when to get off that elevator. It doesn't have to get as bad as the guy next to you. Save yourself the trouble and learn from his experience!