My friends 21st ://

I’m going to try and write this without rambling too much! I’ve had a diagnosis of anorexia and bulimia, alternating between the two, for the last 8 years. I’m currently a 3rd year uni student and as you can imagine, alcohol amongst other things have been a big part of my lifestyle the past couple of years but it wasn’t a problem until the past 12 months. When I first came to uni, having never been a binge drinker or doing any form of drugs beforehand, when I came to uni I was introduced to it all. I very quickly upon joining uni in 2021 started smoking weed pretty regularly, to then doing it everyday. I never saw it as a problem as it wasn’t something I would hide and I would do it socially with my friends but having recently being diagnosed with ADHD, I have started to understand that I was self medicating with it. Alcohol had never really been an issue for me until I started sertraline at the start of 2022 after a pretty bad anorexic relapse and I developed quite bad anxiety from the medication so stopped smoking and switched to alcohol. It’s quite hard to explain but long story short, the sertraline triggered my bulimia and as I had developed bad anxiety from the sertraline I started drinking to quieten the anxiety. A year later I have struggled a lot with alcohol, drinking everyday to replace the smoking, and have formed a bad relationship with it. I recently contacted an AA group in my uni area and since then have given up drinking (I was advised to slowly lessen my drinking but I couldn’t drink w/out binging so ignored the advice and stopped drinking completely). Here’s my dilemma. Coming to uni, for the first two years all I was doing was smoking and going out and formed relationships with people who did the same thing. My ‘bestfriend’ and I would smoke everyday together and that was a big part of our friendship. When I stopped, she at the same time got a boyfriend, and because of a combination of her being with her boyfriend everyday and me no longer smoking, we have stopped hanging out. We live together in a 2 bed flat but I class myself as living by myself as she is only here maybe once a month and the rest I am by myself. I had been really struggling with my eating disorder and drinking everyday for the past 6 months and nobody knows. I pushed a lot of friends away as a result of my ed and drinking which again contributes as to why nobody knows what’s going on. It is my friends 21st in a few weeks and I have been asked to go for drinks, food, and clubbing afterwards to celebrate her birthday. Im stuck in all ends as I quite frankly don’t want to go 😭 but it’s not as easy as that as she came to Amsterdam for my 21st (we were very close then) and I think it would be bad of me to not celebrate hers. As she, nor any of the other people going, know that I struggle with alcohol, I don’t know what to do. Sure I could not drink and no one would question it as I could just say I’m on antibiotics or something of that sort, but I don’t know how the hell to socialise sober amongst 20+ drunk people. As I’m not really close with anyone that’s going anymore, I just feel so awkward being there sober and would really struggle to have any form of conversation or interaction with anyone without feeling awkward asf myself. This Reddit post is so shortened of the actual extent as to what’s happened and is still going on so I don’t think it will make sense too much but if anyone has any advice I would hugely appreciate it 🙂