New to NoFap - Grinding Life

Hi, i'm a 29 year old male from Europe.

I am struggling with porn & masturbation addiction for many years now, and never had much success whenever I tried to put an end to my addiction. I almost always failed at stopping myself from fapping & always beat myself up whenever I do fail.

I never had a romantic relationship and never really had sex. I daily "drown" myself in porn & video games, not only to experience temporary pleasure, but also to make my mind go numb and "forget" about my problems and inefficiencies as a person.

I normally feel loneliness and misery and don't have many things to look forward to when I wake-up in the morning. Can't say I had an easy life growing up or that I have one now that I'm older. Had a lot of problems with family, friends, school, money, alcohol/drugs, social anxiety, you name it, but I'm not trying to make excuses or blame everything on Life. Life is Hard. No question about it.

Recently I experienced an event (that set another chain of events in motion) that kinda felt like a wake-up call. Without many details, I decided to stand my ground and protect someone I care about (something that I don't usually do). It was a very intense experience, but I knew in my heart that it was the right thing to do. I never doubted it for a second. And I succeeded!

That event filled me up with courage and decisiveness, and for some weird reason made me feel better about myself, not to mention it made me stop fapping for almost 2 weeks! I relapsed a couple of days ago, but I still feel that motivation within me to keep going.

I figured that just stopping a bad habit isn't enough. There has to be a counterbalance. I needed some good habits. So I started to excersice, slowly but steadily due to a minor surgery that i had to undergo (nothing serious , don't worry), i started to read more books and I try to tame my anger & frustration whenever something bad/unexpected happens and not let it lash out on myself or others around me.

I wasted a lot of time in my life due to porn/masturbation addiction, but thanks to a couple of kind "strangers", I have a decent job that I'm good at, and a few good advices to keep me on the straight and narrow path. So maybe not evertything is terrible. I'm not saying that I'm gonna make it to the top of Mount Everest (metaphorically speaking of course), but I wanna die knowing that I made a choice to get better, even if my mind trying to trick me to do otherwise, or worse, do nothing at all.

Sorry for the long post, just felt like sharing.

TL;DR
New to NoFap, had a tough life, ready to take on all kinds of challenges.
See you around.