I'm gonna be real with you, it took me a solid three years / four years to feel like I had really gotten substantially better, and I still struggle. Nearly every week it feels like my reserves of energy and happiness deplete. What I've learned is that I have to be gentle with myself, when I get really low, it's okay to just be pissed off and sad for no reason. It's okay to binge watch a TV show or dive headfirst into Zelda for a night, as long as it doesn't rule your life.

Strangely enough, it was the book A Wizard of Earthsea that helped me the most. I don't want to spoil the book for you so skip this paragraph if you ever intend to read it. But the book is about a boy named Ged who is a powerful wizard, and he is pursued by a malevolent shadow. The book ends when Ged finally realizes that he can't run from his shadow, and he has to embrace it as part of himself. It's such a great subversion of the traditional evil villain. All of the tension is suddenly release, and Ged is whole again, simply because he embraced his flaws instead of trying to bury them.

So it's not about fixing yourself. It's about just accepting yourself for what you are, and loving yourself instead of being cruel and hateful. It took me until I was 28 before I realized I could be my own friend. A question I ask myself all the time is "What would healthy lord_yupa do?" and then I try to act like that person.

Early on, I was lucky to move in with a friend who pushed me. He is a very wholesome dude who always prioritizes friendships and self sufficiency with things like cooking and house work. He even builds his own furniture. So partially, just being around him made me want to be a better person. He was the one who got me to start biking and buy my own road bike. I consider him my best friend now, and I'd just about do anything for him.

And the thing that really helped with social anxiety was nofap. I know nofap has a mixed reputation, but it worked for me. It got rid of a lot of shame. I believe that what you choose to give your attention to is one of the most powerful choices you can make in your life. When I was giving a lot of my attention to porn and masturbating regularly to it, I was filled with shame and anxiety. No matter how much I tried to convince myself not to feel shame, I still felt awful after every fap session.

Now I try to go out and put others before myself. And I don't mean that like in a cheesy charity sort of way. I just mean that I try to be genuinely interested in others. Not to get them to like me, or to get a girl's number or any dumb Dale Carnegie shit like that. I just try to actually connect with people. "Hey how's your mom doing? Is she feeling better?" or "I heard your sister is going to grad school, that's awesome!" You know, just genuinely being interested in someone, taking the time to make them feel cared for and that someone is thinking about them, even in small ways.

And the other big thing for me is getting out of toxic relationships. I used to meet a girl, and then move way too fast into a relationship with them. I was a serial monogamist. It would always start with a bang, and then I would push things way to fast towards commitment and so forth. I was a "Nice Guy" even though on the surface I didn't act like one at all. But my behavior was very toxic deep down, especially once the relationship became "Safe" and I could really let my insecurities out on that person. I used to think that it was always the girl's fault. I would do the craziest mental gymnastics to make the girl the badguy, and yeah sure I probably had some legitimate complaints, but I was always the common element. I always stayed in relationships long after I should have left them. And I would bury my resentment at not wanting to be in the relationship and it would come out in all sorts of toxic and hurtful ways.

So the answer for me was just to give up relationships for a while. I'm still in that phase. And it's been really challenging. I can feel that neediness rise up in me sometimes. I want to be mad at someone, I want to blame someone, and it really hit home with me how my anger and selfishness was a common theme in my relationships. And that was really when everything came together for me, I realized I needed to devote my energy to my community of friends and to myself before I could ever hope to be in a healthy relationship. I had to figure out how to love myself and really like my life.

And I would constantly feel guilty and ashamed about my past with women. Like a failure. I had been in all these failed relationships, so I tried to convince my self that I was unworthy of a real partership and hopeless. But that's where Ged came in. Embracing my past, owning it, and learning from it. And that's where I am now, just trying to figure out how to love myself and my life, and figure out what really makes me happy. And huge part of that is just forgiving myself, to actually let go of the torment and shaming I put myself through. It's really fucking hard. And some days suck ass. But then you get to the other side, and life's a little better.