PMO is not relief - a mantra for the brink of relapse

I'm writing this rather than relapsing. I'm at home, my wife is away, and I'm very stressed out with work and the number of things I need to accomplish. So I really really would love to just take a few minutes to PMO and by golly won't everything be so much better after that, and I won't feel like this anymore. Right?

Stress is one of the triggers for me, and it follows this kind of inner logic that I'm just now realizing is horseshit: "PMO would be such a relief."

This is a common theme for me. I tend to view PMO as like a little vacation. I have this idea in my head that everything will be just a little bit easier to deal with if I didn't have this insane "GO FUCK SOMETHING" pulse at the back of my mind. Both abstaining from PMO and just every day life build up a kind of pressure, and PMO looks in my brain like it would just make everything feel so much better.

Problem is that when you're in the midst of that feeling, that makes perfect sense, but you forget the literally thousands of times you've thought the exact same thing, PMO'd, and were left just as twitchy and angry and lonely and crazy and depressed as you were to begin with, if not more so.

PMO is not a relief. It's difficult to actually understand and remember this in the midst of everything, but it's goddamn true and needs to be remembered. You will not feel like a million bucks on the other side of this. You will not be wound-down. You will not be more relaxed. You will not be satisfied. You will not be proud. You will not be confident. You will not be more than you are now. You will not be relieved.

PMO is not a relief. It will not make me feel better. It will not resolve any of my problems. It will not calm me down. It will not make anything easier. It won't help.

PMO is not a relief.