I first started drinking towards the end of being 13 years old. I drank very casually (beside the rare binge with friends in the park after getting our older siblings to go in the shop for us) until about 16years old. 16 years onwards was when I started excessive alcohol binges, but not often enough for it to be considered a problem. I was able call it a night eventually, and could go months without partying, though I was consistently drinking significantly more than all of my friends and making myself sick. Over the next two years, I slowly developed a problem. In UK, the legal age is 18 years old, and when I turned 18 and could buy alcohol and go to nightclubs, I went completely off the rails and developed my three+year battle w binge drinking/general alcoholism