Vanquishing Yonder Demons

Hey everyone. I'm doing this a little bit out of order compared to what I wanted, but oh well. My first post won't be much, just letting people on this forum know that even reading through other people's struggles in their journals helped me today. I am at the 11 day mark, and I was *this* close to relapsing. Luckily God helped lead me to this site instead of the ones I was tempted to go to. I'm planning to post a whole bunch in this thread. Shoutout to jw2021. Reading through a bit of your journey helped me in mine. Thanks man!

 

So, I haven't been posting as much as I should have. A little bit of an update: I managed to stay steady until January 31st, at which point I relapsed. I kept going with my day counter, ignoring that "roadbump," so to speak, but I relapsed again about 5 days ago and today. I have a few theories on why that happened.

First, I haven't properly gotten an accountability partner. I'm not regularly going to a church in the town I'm in (which is an issue I know, will elaborate at a later point), and I don't feel comfortable talking to my friends about it. Secondly, I didn't continue reading the daily Covenant Eyes 40 day thingy; this stopped the daily reminders on the positives to keep going, and likely hastened relapse. Lastly, I have been both stressed and bored. I'm a major procrastinator, and when I'm trying not to look at reddit, youtube, the news, etc. and do homework, the desire to go look at P pops into my brain and won't leave. Add to that my engineering class load, and...well...y'know.

There have already been positive improvements, despite the multiple relapses. The first 22 days were the longest in multiple years I've gone without looking at that garbage, and man, you have no idea how good that felt. The second biggest thing has been my confidence and ability to talk to girls. I know it seems silly, but other than my sisters, my brain has always put them in a "different species" category. After like the 3 week mark, something reset and I was able to talk to them like normal people again instead of massively overthinking, or thinking about them in relation to what I've looked at online and then having a mental battle to not think of them like that. I know this post was pretty ramble-y, but I need to start doing something regularly and talking to people about this or else I don't think I'll ever get rid of the problem.