Well I grew up around drinking and from the age of 15 drank alcoholically. My first experience I drank to excess at a friend’s place when his brother picked up a case of beer vomited a lot and tried to sleep in a field. In November. In Canada!
I never knew social drinking from the beginning Alcohol could be troublesome but it allowed me to go to extreme places and do extreme things. Only my higher power prevented me from killing myself or someone else.
I drank hard at parties all through the rest of high school but managed to get off to University.
Though I considered myself to be an alcoholic from the first year at University I was not as bad as some and I was only arrested once at that time.
Somehow I managed to pass school though excessive drinking certainly made it a challenge and I entered the working world. In my very first job I drank steady for 4 years and probably was only saved by the fact that I stayed inside the union rules. I only used my allotted sick leave (all 20 days of it). Finally after a second arrest I tried AA for a few months and strung together enough sobriety to clear my head and move on to a better job.
During my second job I enjoyed what I was doing and kept sober for months at a time until I started frequent business travel to Asia in 1996.
In 1997, two months before I got married, I was arrested for the third time and entered treatment (outpatient) and AA again. I continued to bounce in and out (mostly out) until 2007.
I have a library of drunk a logs until 2007 when I finally lost a job to booze and tried the program in earnest for the first time.
All I can say is that I was a derelict in some pretty fine hotels and even got kicked out of a country once.
I completed the 12 steps with a sponsor in 2007 and drank again 4 months later. I had not learned to be honest. Had some kind of issue with pride and ego also I think;-) Also only did one easy step 9 and got very complacent very fast.
It took another 16 months and another lost job to really take a look at where I had gone wrong and do the program to the best of my ability exactly as it is written for the first time. And surrender!
My wife and kid were in the process of leaving the first week I was back this time.
At that time I finally took that approach that it did not matter what my sponsor said I would try it. If he said things I did not agree with I learned to say to myself “I don’t believe that YETâ€
Death can be a permanent solution for temporary problems! 
