A lot of revolutions of late.
On Saturday I crashed hard. Spent hours watching P and then PMO'ing twice that day. Whatever my previous shakiness, I could no longer ignore this as now a serious problem. But I still didn't have conviction. The conviction that I had before where I absolutely wanted to rid myself of this thing. I felt that if I didn't have this conviction lying at the base of my actions, I wouldn't be able to resist meaningfully in the long term.
What held back the conviction was that there is something in P that I don't seem to be able to access anywhere else. I don't know if it's how the brain has gotten wired over the years, the bad luck(?) I've had with relationships, or an illusion of another sort. But the the experience was an unparalleled sense of bliss - how can I go on living denying myself this (irrespective of whether it comes from P or not).
I didn't feel as broken down as before, when I first started this journal. I felt pretty helpless on Saturday, but not the rock-bottom helplessness of nearly two years ago. But the problem was serious. What do I do? How do I find the motivation? The strength to truly deal with this? I felt that I cannot make things worse for myself only to get to rock-bottom again. To go to rock-bottom voluntarily seems like a betrayal of my former self; as I if can just activate that state of being mechanically as some sort of switch or technique, to then "fix myself". What was felt back then was existential hopelessness no-one should want to willingly seek out. And to seek it out would be to ridicule that past experience, as something habitual. It seems wrong on so many levels. Lastly, there is no guarantee, if I hit rock bottom, or find a new bottom, that is by itself no guarantee that things will by themselves turns around. Why then does this thinking persist in assuming there is a guarantee. This whole way of thinking about the situation needs to go: I can't go lower in order to higher. I already have that built into me.
So to attack this issue, I different tack is needed. I wrote this out on Saturday evening.
There is no cure. No complete treatment for porn. All there is, is work and the principle - one's own determination to be free.
There will never be a day when I am free from it without letting my guard down. I will always have to work against it, always fight and always endure. Always toil and always fail. Always making it a big deal even when it no longer is. Always feeling like it doesn't matter, like it doesn't change anything, like I am basically the same person as before, only worse off, perhaps enjoying less. Perhaps being less.
Is there honour in this? Is there self-respect? I know from the outside how damaging this is to me, but this is not the view from inside. From the inside I find some otherwordly sense of freedom and bliss, and I have to say no, never, to this.
I don't know if I will experience this elsewhere. Perhaps I won't. It may never be ever experienced, and even what I experienced is but a shadow of the real thing. But haven't so many things already become past. All we can really do is begin new things, to do poetry with the world. Touch things truly with your mind, it is all working to be free.
I need the hunger again, to starve myself. But to do that, I need the faith. Only faith can carry me through--that is the principle. The source-principle.
What I'm trying to do, I think, is to scout out just what it is I envision in the end-state of all of this, or basically the future. Maybe I had an idea that I could get off PMO for a time and then that would be it, like taking some certificate. You did the thing, now you can "move on". But maybe that was too naive. Maybe it's a never-ending battle that'll always be there for me. So I imagine the worst case scenario of being PMO-free: that nothing much actually changes, that I would only exclude a number of "wonderful" things, in short a net negative. Do I still want this? What could possibly motivate me? There doesn't seem to be a good prospect, so what is rational in taking this path willingly? How can I get the conviction, or faith, that I need through this bleak vision?
One of the issues I've had of late is that I can't seem to relax or find fun in doing stupid things. Work has been so intense that everything else in life seems just like frustration or a lower-quality sense of being. Where I have this sense of forward momentum in my work, other areas of life don't offer the same kind of quality. I've come to expect quality relaxing, quality fun, in addition to the quality work. And so I avoid series, video games and such stuff, and what do I do? I fall right back into P. How stupid is that? I avoid the apparently "stupid" things only to do the dumbest sh*t of them all. In my reflexions after the PMOs on Saturday, one of the first things was to see this stupidity and to start by forcing myself to include basic relaxing things out of, if nothing else, duty. Because I was royally shook up, I thought it would be good to revisit an old favorite and just watch that as part entertainment and part inspiration. I watched the first Rocky film that evening and I took note of a few new things.
One of the great things about the hero in these films is that it's not about being the strongest, the smartest, throw the mightiest punches, but how much sh*t you can take, how many times you get knocked down and
still be able to get up. The heroic thing is then not to avoid falling but in finding faith that you will get yourself seriously punished and in that very same scenario, know that you will have the strength to get up. On the night before the final fight, Rocky takes a walk and finds himself in despair. He knows he won't beat Apollo--there just isn't any chance in hell for him to do that. He lies down in bed and relays his inner conflict to his girlfriend Adrian. She listens to him patiently and then asks what he'll do. And here's, what I think, the stunning part: Rocky doesn't brush away his expectation that he can't win, this is a serious expectation calculated by him, and to think otherwise would be fantasy, but he instead finds another goal. Nobody has ever gone the distance with Apollo. He could be that guy, who takes the punishment and outlasts the fight. This becomes his conviction, his faith and his strength. And it defined the character in these series, the guy is literally hard like a rock! (No puns intended!)
So I'm thinking that given I can't win the fight against P--there will never be a situation where I am "completely over P"--what I can do is to "go the distance with P". Where then is my conviction coming from? From the very fact that this has become a problem and I have poured all my attention and thinking into it. Even if I can't spell out a definite idea that's guiding me, something *is* prompting me to take this seriously and work out a solution--even if no solution presents itself. If it wasn't an issue, I wouldn't have bothered so much as I did with the PMO's over the weekend (I would probably has been in the state of slight indifference which I was previously in these past months) -- but that just isn't factually the case. The conviction comes from the fact that I'm actually caring. This care which has forced me to recalibrate my visions of the future and find better and more robust strategies to deal with this--even to go into strategies that may not make much sense! So P-free state isn't promising much, I may not be better off--do I still want to try to deal with it? Yes, I must because I already am. There isn't really an option. There are no two paths here. The P *is* the problem; I cannot "unproblem" it. I'm already in the ring and the sooner I make that explicit the better I can deal with the punches as they come and be prepared to get up, however many times it needs to be done; however many times I fall, I'll stand up one more time. There's no situation where I'm knocked down so much that I can't raise myself, however slow that getting up may take.
So this is my weird, back-and-forth thought process about this. It may be that one day one can be "free of P", but that's just not the mentality that works for me right now. There's no vision that contains anything else than the situation I now find myself in, taking the beating--the urges, desires, etc.--and getting through it.
But for practical things. I'm still exercising. I had a great session yesterday where I worked upper body and then went for a long jog. I was totally drained by the end of the day. I also will take time and force myself to do stupid things for relaxing: watch series, play video games or some other thing. Because, at the end of the day, these waste-of-time things far outperform the dumbest thing of watching P.
So we'll see how things go. I should also try to check in here more often but not as a way of relaxing or when I have to much work to do elsewhere.
One last thing: with the new resolve comes new milestones. First things first, 90-day hardmode activated. Gotta get in shape to be able to "go the distance with P", and nothings better for that than a 90-day "montage". Thanks for checking in guys.
It's been 1 day since I PMO'd.