New year, new me (but this time for real)
It's never easy to change the stuff you've been doing for your whole life, but it can be done, if you have a reason and a plan.
Have you ever set a New Year's resolution, but ended up giving up on it or forgetting about it? I certainly have for the last 19 years. But this year, I decided to get my act together.
The struggle is real
I've always seen my way of living a bit depressing. Spending most of my time behind a desk, staring at a computer screen, that sounds more like torture than fun. But for a long period of time, I've done basically nothing but that. The worst thing is, I knew exactly that it's not okay, but have chosen to simply live with it.

This changed approximately one-and-a-half year ago, when I joined a group of volunteers to help create educational competitions for elementary and high-school students, but that's a story for another day. The important part is, that it helped me move forward, away from my comfort zone.
One-and-a-quarter year later from that and I successfully finished high school. Most of my schoolfellows decided to go for university, but I really wanted to start a business with my friend and just make stuff. But after many hours of listening to my parents, I've decided to at least try what university life is like.
I attended my classes like a good student... for like a month. After that I started to get this conflicting feeling of I want to study X I'm not made for this. For days I would sit at my computer and stare at the screen while thinking I should get this assignment done, or I should finally complete this task I wanted to do two days ago. And then I didn't. And because I didn't, I obviously felt bad about it, which led to me not doing anything again and again and again.
One day I decided it was enough. Motivated by my friend-turned-business-partner, I decided to drop out. I was lucky enough that my parents are kind enough not to simply throw me out on the street. But I can't live from their support forever.
Salvaging what I can
After regaining more time for myself, I wanted to try to make my life at least a bit better. The worst thing is, I thought it would all come by itself, because this was all caused by me going to uni, but I couldn't have been more wrong.
This really got stuck inside my head after New Year's. Everyone was setting their resolutions, but I was aware about my track record of not completing mine. But because I already decided to drop out of uni, I basically dared myself to change my life for the better, so that I'd at least do something meaningful in my free time.
The most important part of fixing my life was taking little steps. Instead of trying to reach a goal of 8K steps every day, I first started at the core: getting my ass outside at the very least every second day of the week. I've combined this with less public transport where I could, so I would get more steps per day.
Next, I've tried to help my social life. I've started to hang out with my friends more, be it online or offline. Best is to combine this with walking, there's nothing better than taking an afternoon (or even multiple days) off and going on a trip somewhere with your friends to clear your head.
The cooking incident
Another thing I wanted to improve were my eating habits. For the past 3 months, I've relied either on lunch menus in restaurants or food delivery. Neither of these are really financially sustainable, so I wanted to cook for myself sometimes. However, scared of the results, I never really got into it, until now.
For my birthday, I got a cookbook from my mum (thanks <3), so it was never a better time to get into cooking. I couldn't really set on what my first recipe should be, but I decided to stick with soups for now. And so I got the ingredients and started cooking. Even though there were some hiccups at first and it probably took me twice the time than it was estimated in the book, I managed to follow the recipe and not burn down the whole house.
Then came the tasting part. I was really afraid that all of my effort would go to waste, but to my surprise, the soup was actually tasty. This really filled me with joy, you probably wouldn't find a person who would be more happy from a soup than me. But most importantly, it gave me enough confidence to try more recipes.
Too much pleasure is too much
I masturbate. And so do many other people, and it's okay. But what's not okay is when it turns from pleasure into a routine. I've found myself masturbating every day at approximately the same times. Other times it was simply because I felt like I had nothing better to do. And the worst was all the pornography I was consuming in the process.
The even worse thing (yes, you read that right), is when vanilla porn just doesn't cut it anymore. You start exploring all the different kinks, fetishes and whatnot and it can really distort your view on regular, real-life, non-porn sexual intercourse. And so I decided to cut that from my life too.
As a starter, I decided to stop watching porn altogether, and tuned down the times I'd go masturbating. This is really hard sometimes, as at this point, it's basically like an addiction inside my brain. The best thing I came up with to combat this is to simply focus on something else: read a book, go outside, play a game or talk with friends – just don't think about sex.
In the end...
this is not the end, but only the beginning. As I've said, small steps are needed, but I'd like to ramp up and reach my goals sometime during this year. But for now, I feel pretty happy about myself. Well, it's really the reason why I'm even writing this post, so if all goes well, I'll keep you updated. 😉