Katzen

I'm up at 2 am because I screwed up my sleep schedule but I'm curious what is the most embarrassing thing people have done while drunk. (Come on, everyone must have at least one story.)

For me it was in the 1980s, I lived in San Diego, had a friend lived near the trolley station where you could ride the trolley to the Tijuana border, walk across, and a couple blocks away were numerous clubs where you could drink for very cheap, many you paid admission price and it was all-you-can-drink-free.

One place had ladies' night, ladies got in free, drank free, I think men only paid about $5. I rarely drank back then, hated the taste of alcohol, so drank stuff where you couldn't taste alcohol. And assumed they really watered down the booze, ordered something like vodka/cranberry, tasted nothing but cranberry. A friend was drinking vodka straight and said it tasted like mostly water.

I should add, I was with very old, trusted friends, 2 who never drank alcohol, I think there was 1 other woman and 6 men in our group.

I meant to limit myself to 2 drinks, but because they tasted so plain I ended up having perhaps 5 or more. Then they called out it was time for the mechanical bull riding contest... I vaguely remember enthusiastically wanting to do this, which was very unlike my shy self. Also, I was wearing a mid-thigh mini dress and slip-on sandals.

I vaguely remember climbing on the mechanical bull, it started and scared the hell out of me... Then I guess I blacked out.

Woke up the next morning in my bed, in my undies and bra, with an enormous sombrero (must have been 4 feet across) in bed next to me. No clue how I got there, what happened.

Called a friend of mine, he said I won the sombrero because I rode that bull for the longest amount of time that night, several minutes. He didn't notice I was totally drunk, I seemed a bit tipsy but was still functioning, walked back across the border fine, made it through immigration easily. He drove me home, helped me upstairs to bed (btw, he's gay) in which I stripped off my dress in front of him and passed out in bed.

If that experience wasn't strange enough, 2 weeks later they talked me into going back to the same club. And to my utter embarrassment as we were entering 2 guys at the front checking IDS remembered me and asked if I was going to ride the bull again, they missed seeing me last week.

That was my last visit to Tijuana clubs.

So I'd love to hear others' embarrassing stories.

Meraviglioso

Some people love these threads, some people hate them.
I could list hundreds of embarrassing stories from my drinking days. I don't have too much sober time added up but am clear headed enough now to see that my embarrassing drinking episodes "oh the horror! I took off my bra and thew it at the band then tried to climb on stage and take over the microphone in front of the shocked crowd" slowly, then quickly starting slipping into the more soul-crushingly sad kind of embarrassing, i.e. having the nanny shush my kids into the house to avoid seeing their mother passed out on the front porch, mid-day, covered in red wine stained vomit.....
While sharing these kinds of memories has some advantage (never wanting to go there again) I really want to start moving forward.

Lightning Bug

Mera is right, some people love war stories and others prefer to live in the now. I don't mind telling stories, it keeps in focus the person I never want to be again.

My most embarrassing one is my rock bottom story. I have told this one here before, so I won't get into details. But anyway, I ended up in a drunken haze on an ordinary Tuesday in a taxi on my way to a Hilton where I checked into a suite and paid for it with my debit card. I had sweet talked my driver into swinging by Walgreens before we got to the hotel, so I was packing a huge mama bear bottle of red. Of course I neglected to buy a corkscrew, so I cleverly hacked into mama bear with a Bic pen.

The next thing I knew I woke up in a tee shirt and underwear on the bathroom tile completely soaked in toilet water that had been gushing out of a giant crack in the toilet bowl. Judging by the way my head was feeling and the way my eyes were seeing things that weren't really there, I ascertained that I had cracked said toilet bowl with my head.

I had to do something, so I stumbled and crawled to the phone and my call immediately brought two Spanish speaking older gentlemen with a dry vac to my room where they proceeded to suck up the water, glare hatefully at me, and mutter what I assumed to be Spanish curse words.

In all this feverish activity, someone decided to call 911. I was soon approached by some hot firemen and an EMT that could get your Mama drooling. They checked me over and then allowed another guy in the room. He had a pissy face and a bad attitude and he didn't like the way I bumbled my way with my answers. At the time I didn't care because I had all this nice attention from hotties in uniform. I should have cared though, turned out the pissy guy was a cop. Apparently I had called my husband and scared him into thinking I hurt myself on purpose. Pissy cop decided I was a danger to myself. And then I was hauled off in an ambulance, treated for a concussion, and vacationed for 3 days in a psych lock up where I withdrew from alcohol while coloring fancy pages with markers.

I ended up $1000 poorer when the Hilton docked my debit for damage to the room, hit with a mountain of medical co-pays, plus another grand for my plush ride downtown with the hottie EMT, and I lost my iPhone and pearl necklace when the Hilton denied I had left them there.

I stopped drinking that week in April. Had one relapse after it which led me to rehab, but that is a whole other story.

trachemys

I don't remember them.

Katzen

My apologies if my post offends anyone, though I think my subject title says what it's about and if people dislike the subject they are free to ignore it.

I am on day 8 of being sober, and I am deeply thinking about why I even started drinking in excess in the first place. It helps me to think about bad events in my life caused by drinking, there really weren't many, but the few I had made me swear off drinking ever again.

Such as the story I initially posted... So I'm deeply pondering how/why I ended up being an alcoholic that seemed so,physically addicted that I had to take a swig every couple hours just to fend off the shakes.

My life now is better than ever, so how did I end up drinking so much? I've been pondering my past, and also reading many posts from others who hit all-time-lows even worse than mine.

My reason for posting this thread was I've read a few rock-bottom posts, many brought tears to my eyes, though some had a bit of humor that perhaps the poster might laugh about it a year or more later saying they were embarrassed and never want to repeat such activity.

Again, hope anybody who finds my post offensive just ignored it and passed on by... But I do find reading about others' mishaps helpful in that I don't want to continue drinking in excess and finding myself in similar situations.

"This could happen to you if you continue to let drinking control your life" - and most likely I do not want anyone else's most embarrassing situation to happen to me.

Lightning Bug

Congrats on 8 days! I don't think your post was offensive at all, and it does say the subject in the title so those who don't want to participate can pass it.

I think threads like this can be therapeutic because it puts the reader in a reflective mode - one in which he can think back and remember the ugly and bad side of drinking. Early recovery has a trap that some get caught in, and that is one that glamorizes drinking. They remember all of the good experiences, the fun, etc. Butfor most of us the fun died away fast.

So reflection is good, remember your past so you won't repeat it.

madgirl

In a way, I wish I could find the humor in some of my drinking horror stories so the shock/sadness would cease to have power over sober me, but I can't.

Meraviglioso

No offence taken- at least not here. But it is also important to remember there is some point- hard to say when or where- that "embarrassing" transitions into a profound shame and total lack of self-worth. As our alcoholism gets worse, whether we see it or not the situations we put ourselves in become more and more difficult to laugh off or categorise as simply "embarrassing". They become so, so much worse than just that.
I fortunately (unfortunately?) don't recall many embarrassing stories as I fell past that stage into near constant hell-on-earth, 24 hour a day shame.

MLD51

Embarrassing doesn't even begin to describe some of my drinking episodes. Humiliating, soul-crushing, dangerous, absolutely out of character - that's more like it. My most horrible story is of my second DUI (of 3, yes, 2 wasn't enough for me). I was driving home drunk after almost a whole day of drinking. Thought I was ok because I had "paced myself." I turned left at a traffic signal a few blocks from my house - but swung the turn so wide I took out the signal with the front of my car. I mean - I knocked it over and it ended up under my car. I live in a pretty small town where the local paper just loves to publish stories about these things. So about half or more of the town knew about it within a day or two. My bac was .034. I was lucky on many counts that night - I didn't die of alcohol poisoning, I wasn't hurt in the crash, and I didn't hurt anyone else.

So if I ever even THINK drinking is a good idea, I remember that, or one of many other occurrences, and that thought just goes POOF!

Fly N Buy

It was completely natural early on for me to focus on the "what it was like". Most of us certainly did. As time passes many try to simply stay in the solution and work on that.

I find your thread useful reminding me of where my journey started not that long ago.

Keep posting and keep coming back!

Anna

No offence taken here either, but there are more positive things to think about.

Jsbodhi

I participate in these threads too- I like to stay positive too; but sometimes I just need a good reminder.
No offence taken here xo

Optimini

I have too many to post. The most embarrassing ones are usually verbal disagreements with people in public and I'm either extremely mean or start crying. Those didn't happen often, I wasn't an angry person when drunk but I wouldn't back down if someone started with me.
One of the embarrassing situations was one of the reasons I decided to quit permanently, it occurred just a few days before I stopped. My office has weekly happy hours and I was the life of the party, even just being there a few short months. I'd always come up with games or jokes and had a lot of fun. Well of course, there's always got to be one person who has to ruin everything, this one gal just doesn't like me. I always noticed her rolling her eyes while I talked to other people, etc. Then she asked me about a project I finished and I was trying to be nice by sharing the information....well she didn't like the way I did it and she started yelling at me, and demeaning me in front of one of my managers. I was raising my voice and throwing it right back at her. My manager had no idea how to handle it. I ended up grabbing my drink and just walking away, thankfully at that point I only had two vodka drinks and still had some self control. If I had two more I probably would have called her at least the "b" word, if not a "c" word, and she definitely deserved it. But regardless, if I had stooped to that level - even if I had every right to do it, who knows what would have happened. Things are going so well for me with my job (even if they are a bit stressful) and it all could have gone down the toilet.
I left the office and stopped at the grocery store to get more vodka, a lady said something nice to me and I burst into tears and told her what happened, like some blubbering idiot. How embarrassing. And I drank an entire bottle of vodka that night and got in a fight with my husband. Good times, right? NOT.

kk1k5x

I didn't check my posting history, but I'm fairly sure I initiated a similar one when I joined SR. The reactions/comments were the same, some shared, some suggested we do something else. Back then I also had the feeling of 'pondering about the past', sharing stories - I think part of it was because of the therapeutic effect that reading some bios had on me and I wished to continue that therapy - but it very soon did lead to the events, blackouts, projectile vomiting which far surpasses the threshold of 'embarrassing'.

No offence taken and hopefully none doled out either. From my own experience, I'd rather say that with the ones I/you can maybe pass off as simply 'embarrassing', there's a certain romanticising action still going on. I would also suggest that for the majority of people, those 'embarrassing' ones (as I've defined them) took place somewhere in the early days.

For example, at a high school trip abroad, I blacked out for about 12 hours during the busiest time of day. I walked around with others, visited places, people took pictures of me, but I don't remember any of it. I woke up on the bus, later in the evening, even though I saw the sun was setting, I asked my friend sitting next to me 'So when are we going to go sightseeing?', since I thought I had maybe just fallen asleep for a while. I did start the day with (I don't know how much of it I managed to drink, actually) a liter bottle of vodka, so no surprise in the blackout as we had been drinking pretty heavily for the past two days anyways. Consider now for awhile that this was back in high school already.

I can still pass this story off as embarrassing for the usual reasons - young, dumb, laughed it off with the others as some did something similar on that trip etc.

And people have a plethora of such stories. Some went to Tijuana, some to a Hilton, some on a school trip, just their local pub etc. What's important to me now, is not how these stories DIFFER from each other, but how they are all exactly THE SAME in their core. If that's what you are focusing on, then I hope my bit helped you, too.

Essentially it doesn't really matter how or why we started drinking or how it developed into alcoholism, as long as we understand that this is where we are now. An 'embarrassing' story is something I managed to live with, the horror stories they quickly developed into were much harder to stomach. Vomiting on the inside of your bedroom's door because you just chugged 2 pints of beer in 6 minutes and then mopped that mess up crying and shaking on the floor - that's no longer embarrassing, that's something totally different.

I hope you thank whatever deity or force of nature that your guardian angels were sober on that night in Tijuana. It could have been something a lot different than 'embarrassing'...

Moving forward is the only direction worth moving in. Hope you're well

Delizadee

My last few years of drinking were a horrible awful painful, frightening, reckless mess.
I drank far too much to ever remember the good feelings of drinking that led to embarasing stories. I have got a lot of guilt, shame and regret over the past two years of my drinking. I wish I could forget those as well as the embarasing stories.

The only embarassing thing that was a steady thread through my drinking career was people finding my stashes of hidden empties or full bottles or cans. That was always shamefully embarasing.

Soberpotamus

I choose to let these sorts of things remain in my past, where they belong. They happened, I was there, and I'm sure it royally sucked. But now, I believe the quality of my own recovery and sobriety are evident in my desire and willingness to live comfortably in the present, respect my past, and live with hope that I have a good future ahead. Ugly memories don't motivate me at all.

Jsbodhi

I was in laos and drank a child's sand bucket full of mekong whiskey all day,
Blacked out, came to briefly as I was running through a rice field with no shoes alone in the dark by myself.
Woke up in my hostel room ( made it back somehow) there were noodles and blood all over the floor.
Not sure what happened.
Needless to say I caught the next bus out of that town in the morning.......


Then like mera it turned into more pathetic things like my ex boyfriend took a video of me in a blackout to show me what I was like.
It was horrifying- not embarrassing per say- but shocking.

OpioPhobe

Probably the first time I started drinking in the mornings. It was pretty embarrassing to not be able to make it a couple hours without drinking. The pacing back and forth in the kitchen before I drank was embarrassing too. No one else was there to witness it, but I was ashamed of myself.

Linz805

I don't mind thinking back to embarrassing stories because to me it really affirms why the heck I don't drink anymore. I was at a club drinking heavily, couldn't really even stand up right. I was walking to my friends car and the next thing I know I basically face planted the concrete. Broke my front tooth! I had to wait a whole day till the dentist opened to get it fixed. There are multiple stories but I think that one takes the cake. I can laugh at it now. It's insanity!

fred59

guzzled half a bottle of Tequila (37 years ago) jumped on stage with Gamma (Ronnie Montrose) grabbed the mike yelled Rock n Roll did a stage dive about 20 minutes later I was in Santa Cruz Jail, oh what fun!