Breaking the loops
Working on itThe hardest thing to put on a public page: the habits I am working to get free of, and why honesty is the one that unlocks the rest.
This is the least comfortable thing on the site, and that is exactly why it is here. If I keep a public record of the work and leave out the hardest part, the record is a sales pitch, not the truth.
There are three things I am working to get free of, and they are tangled together.
The three
Pornography. The oldest one, twelve or thirteen years of it, and the one that has quietly undercut the most.
Video games. Not the playing, the using. When the pressure climbs I disappear into a game the way other people reach for a drink, to drone out a reality I do not want to face.
Not telling the whole truth. The quiet one, and the one that makes the other two possible. Not outright lying so much as leaving things out, shading them, letting a story land softer than it earned.
Why this is one entry, not three
They feed each other. Feed one and it spreads to the rest. The more I dodge the truth, the easier it is to disappear into a game, and the easier that is, the easier the rest of it gets. These are not three separate habits. They are one loop wearing three faces, and the loop runs on hiding.
Why it is public
The honest move would be to keep this private, and that instinct is the problem in miniature. Hiding is the fuel. So it goes on the open page, under my own name.
There is an idea, aimed at men in particular, that admitting a weakness makes you smaller. I think the opposite is true. Saying plainly who I am and what I am not proud of, then showing the work I am doing on it, takes more than hiding does, and it gives more back. Even read coldly, in pure self-interest, it is the better deal. You cannot fix what you will not name, and you cannot get help with a problem you pretend you do not have.
The actual work
So the work is not willpower in a vacuum. It is honesty first, because nothing else holds without it. And it is asking for help instead of pretending I can white-knuckle it alone, which I have tried, and which has not worked.
You do not finish this. It is like quitting smoking, where you are never quite done. Years clean, and you can still walk past someone with a cigarette and feel the pull come straight back. So the goal is not a finish line. It is to keep choosing, one crossroads at a time, and to make the next choice easier than the last by being honest about the one before it. This page is one of those choices.
- An honest checkpoint, around day 145. Past the 100-day mark, and not a clean streak. Gaming crept back this weekend when the willpower ran low, and naming that is the whole point. The markers I am holding to from here: 150 days at the end of May, and half a year on July 1.
- The decision. No pornography, no video games, and a pledge to do the honest work. This is not something you finish in a day. It is a level of choices, not a box you tick, so I am not going to measure it as one.