If you are feeling confident, stay alert

The awareness, the carefulness never ends. You must be vigilant about your recovery. Prepare for every single day for the rest of your life to be active. When I say active, I mean that you can't let your guard down. You must keep expending energy to stay up on your hobbies, actions, healthy habits, and avoidance of bad habits.

The most soul crushing relapses have happened when I "go hard" and exclude all porn, youtube, television, and other bullshit from my life. I feel absolutely great and I start to think, "Man, I've gone 3 weeks now without it. I can relax now." That is a big fucking mistake.

Right now I want to make a promise to myself that I will never watch porn again, but I've made that promise and broken it about a hundred times. Fuck that. I must accept the situation I am in. I relapsed again, I am having trouble with a porn addiction, it's hard for me to perform in bed, I get stressed really easily and cry about it because I have used porn so many times to hide from my problems. I'm a porn addict and I care too much about what other people think, because the first thought that comes to mind after a relapse is "darn, now I'm going to seem less confident tomorrow." Fuck that. My thoughts and beliefs aren't working. The fear that controls me isn't helping. The fear my father and peers instilled in me when I was younger is not helping.

I have to find a new reason to do this, and make sure that I stay alert and disciplined every single day. If I feel like shit, or if I feel good, I must stay on my path to success. Not to seem more confident. Not to be a better person for everyone else. No. Fuck that. This is for me. Independence is the base. I'm doing this for me, first and foremost. Because I care about myself. No matter how hard or fucking brutal life feels, I will develop a perverted joy in that discomfort. Because true happiness is a state. It comes slowly. It's not the emotion you feel from instant gratification. Happiness comes from who you become as a person. And once you build it up, or actually, once you realize that you already have it by getting all the desires and bullshit out of the way, no one or no thing can break it.