The beginning of day 10. I would like to continue on with my personal journey for a little bit. So yeah I had begun to gravitate towards pornography that was beyond what I had considered to my usual 'hetero' stuff. As I said, at the time, I think this was causing me some level of anxiety but I wasn't really seeing the ultra negative effects just yet. A friend of mine then suggested that we move to a different country for a year and I was all for it. The funny thing is I'd spent my while teens talking about how I was going to live in a big city when I was older and all that......and yet if my friend hadn't actually asked me to go somewhere.....well I don't know if I would have actually gotten off my ass to leave. I was always the talker; eager to let everyone know I had plans and I was going to go somewhere but perhaps deep down knowing I had no plans and I was totally lost. I remember I even kept delaying buying the plane ticket until he went ahead and did it. And I had like a year to prep and save money and I didn't really save a cent before I went over. I know I was young and stupid but I don't want to give myself too much of a break because I was more immature and stupider than your average 21 year old I believe. Anyway with no real useful qualifications, no driving licence and hardly any savings we moved away. In retrospect I should have learnt how to take better care and be responsible for myself before going over; my experience would have been far better. The first two months were a fun but fun in the way that drinking alcohol and doing drugs can be fun which is to say it gets old fast. I remember distinctly thinking to myself that I hadn't come over for this, to do the same fucking thing that I had been doing in my hometown but I continued to do it anyway. I think I also pushed myself to become someone I wasn't: I suppose that's natural when you go somewhere new and are no longer constricted by the expectations and opinions of your old town but it didn't necessarily feel like the real me was emerging or something.....like I wasn't being this totally disingenuous person but I think I was really pushing myself hard to make other people like me, to be the joker because I felt so fucking uncomfortable in my own damn skin. I wanted the confidence and adventurous spirit that everyone around me seemed to have but it wasn't in me or at least I didn't encourage it to rise to the surface. In essence I had gone somewhere new but all the feelings of disconnect and confusion about myself and my life had followed me and rather than finding a new way to deal with it, well I just continued numbing myself the ways I had become accustomed to; porn, weed, alcohol and hard drugs. And my friend who I moved over there with; well I kind of let him down over there too. See he wasn't the most social of guys; I knew before we went over that he was going to have problems connecting with people over there; he has his own issues with alcohol and himself. At some point over there I drifted away from him in quite a deliberate way; people over there didn't know what to make of him and I guess I pulled away. Now I'm not taking responsibility for his social anxiety or the mistakes he made over there but we had gone there together and I was supposed to be his friend, I could have talked to him and found out if there was a way I could help him connect better....i mean Jesus one honest conversation and we both could have realised that we were feeling a bit fucked and lost and then come up with a plan. But I was selfish; people liked 'me' I had work and I was chugging alone and so I pretty much gave up on the guy. Without work and pretty much left to himself, he ended up going back to our home country.....i didn't even see the guy off properly, I shook his hand one evening and that was that.....man that was shitty. Thankfully we're still friends. Well that's all I can muster this morning. Have a blessed day brothers!