Day 1, Afternoon/Evening - April 16, 2020
1:50 pm:
sitting at my laptop doing work, i am starting to want to edge again naturally. I have to remain concious though and not do it. that is the first step to relapsing, the first step to hell. life is always exponential, it either gets exponentially better or exponentially worse. I have to draw the line at the start. no more of this. I want to be free, and i want to live a meaningful life.
5:28 pm:
Feeling a ton of urges right now, mostly stemming from my girlfriend. She’s so sexual, but I’ve been trying to get her to tone it down, to not much avail. But I need to control my mind first and foremost. I can’t always control what other people say and do, but I can be mindful myself. So I’m back for my afternoon/evening journal. I want to do this consistently for at least a good portion of this streak, until it gets easier to be mindful in my brain. However, having an afternoon journal, just one, and a nightly check-in sounds like a good idea for the future.
Btw, I’m waiting for sex until marriage, which is something you might have wondered reading this. So anyway, PMO is definitely still something I really need avoid.
Another feeling has crept in today, which it has for the past several weeks. Complacency. And this is really what I was trying to mitigate yesterday when I made my plan for today. All was basically going well, but my schedule was too rigid, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me, so when working on my assignment was delayed, I got a bit sidetracked. But now I need to remember that this day needs to be productive and I need to be vigilant, since I am also low on sleep (which is a typical trigger for me, especially as the day raps up).
I think a lot of what my urge is saying, is that “ok it’s fine because others do it”. It’s trying to argue for normalcy. Because my girlfriend is so sexual, you know it’s ok to be focused on it too. But that’s not the case. I’ve been listening to a lot of Jordan Peterson lately, and as I said in my afternoon blurb, life is exponential. Jordan said this, and it’s really spoken to me. Because it rings true in my life with this addiction more than anything else. If I stay on the right track, lift my gaze towards being a respectable man, someone I am proud of, then more opportunities arise for me to be better, I become more productive over time, I’m more able to contribute to this forum and more able to help others.
On the other hand, when I relapse or edge or let myself go in some form in accordance with this addiction, I become not just lazy for the day, no, I become everything I hate, over time. It just keeps getting worse. And in sync with that, life becomes worse, my outlook becomes more negative, more nihilistic. I fail to see opportunities to better myself, and I’m unwilling to take them anyway.
I fail to become a man. I act as a tyrant unto myself, forcing the future me, the me from tomorrow, from a week from now, and the me from 2 years from now, to cater to the person I am right now. I live out of sync with my own self-community, terrorizing my future self. And if I can’t even live in community with myself, then how am I supposed to contribute to a community outside myself, to my family, friends, and strangers?
So the reality is, is that choosing such a path, choosing to cross my lines, will bring nothing but anxiety and uselessness into my life. Which is funny, because I relapse to make the useless feelings go away, but that actually only brings me closer to a useless existence. As with all addictions.
I must fight this, because I must live.