Relapse.
Not directly, but in my heart at the end of the day I knew I had crossed the threshold. I had decided to take the day off and when I was reading something for my own pleasure, the "stranger" (with its seductive chant) prompted me, just like that, out of nowhere. Long story short, I ended up looking at ads and then short pornography clips for hours. It was a real battle to stave it off. I ended up deciding to masturbate having a bath but without any images or anything (but the fire from having watched so much certainly was coursing through me).
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The first voice that came to me was that I had failed, and that I had been failing for the past weeks, that I was going downhill. That when I believing things were going better they were actually headed for the worse. There was a sense that I had deserved this, that I deserved to crash and that I actually was no better than this.
Then came the second voice. The rebellious voice: things were not getting worse, I have had a few setbacks but on the whole I was doing better! Better - not perfect! And all that was not to waste; it is not wasted, for as long as I persist. You either change in the other's terms or you change on your own.
Sometime later a third voice announced itself. I have been working relentlessly for the past weeks, and I just don't have a good mechanism to ease this intensity. The relapse happened exactly as I tried to calm down from work; when I'm fully in work-mode there is (usually) no real issue. Deeper change will no doubt still be needed. I need to harness a stronger power still--find my power in the world.
I don't see what happened yesterday as a failure, but a communication that there is still more work to do on myself. The system for the past 13 weeks has worked comparatively well--damn well, in fact--but now I get the chance to learn, reflect and tweak it further. This relapse is an opportunity for
even more growth and development. So I already started going to the gym and to the swimming pool, I try to keep minimum 2 sessions a week but ideally I want 3. I have then the physical stuff down. What I need more of, however, is the social stuff, or perhaps also something new.
Something else that's been bugging my mind over the past several weeks is that working this hard doesn't make me directly happy (classic, I know). What I mean is that I do enjoy most of the time the work, keeping busy, etc. But then there are moments where I go like "oofff, what is all this
for? At the end of the day, I always return alone. Nothing I do is for anyone other than myself. But I am also nothing for anyone else." This last cannot be true, because my closest friends are
not nothing to me, and so, being a proper friendship,
I cannot be less than nothing for them. This thought is just plain false. Be that as it may, perhaps it genuinely expresses my emotional self?
@Orbiter Thanks for your thoughts dude! I agree completely with what you say, and I deleted the apps this morning. Unfortunately, there is just no way I can take a week off (I'm at the end of my degree here). At best, I can take a day off, which is what I tried to do yesterday (and we see what happened...). It's weird, it's like I'm stuck in a work-spiral, but I'm unable to find anything else for myself or relax quietly for a single day without getting "ambush