Gonna take back my life (will try to post daily updates)

Day 1

Hello trailblazers, Linus here. Would appreciate all your words of advice and encouragement!

I’m 26 years old and for most of my life I’ve been the typical overachiever, good grades, scholarships, debate and sporting medals. I’ve always told myself that I’m destined to use these skills to one day help people on a very large scale. I used to run my own tuition charity for underprivileged children. However all of this started to unravel over the past 3 years.

Since I was 13 (wow half my life now), PMO has been the dark side of my life. I’ve always known that it was wrong, but I never seriously tried to combat it as I rationalised that I’ve managed to keep it under control.

Uni was the best time of my life, for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who challenged me and pushed me forward. By the time I graduated, I felt like I was ready to take on the world. However, right after Uni, I had to undergo 3 years of compulsory military service. This was a long period of not using my intellect, and the spare energy was increasingly soaked up by turning to PMO. During that time, I also broke up with my girlfriend (the only person I’ve ever truely loved), further deepening the problem.

I thought these problems would go away when military service ended but they didn’t, they transformed into more sinister forms. The constant fantasising has made it impossible to sustain subsequent relationships, I became unfaithful (for the first time in my life) and seriously hurt my partners, I’ve sworn off relationships till I can get myself sorted. But this isolation further increased feelings of loneliness and esascabated the problem.

Now I’ve finally changed to a job which challenges me, yet I find myself unable to delay gratification and focus on a challenging task for prolonged periods. I now often feel anxious and incompetent when faced with a complex task and often revert to PMO.

Was feeling like rock bottom today when I found this community. Reading all your success stories, all I could think was how much I wanted these “superpowers” for myself again and how I longed for a world where I felt excitement about life, when I yearned for this, where I saw colour again, rather than just shades of gray.

Will be attempting the 7, 30 then 90 day challenge, and posting my updates here, thank you in advance for all your support!