Day 2, I’m struggling already

I chose a career path that a lot of people often discount as unattainable. I did well in high school, well enough to graduate at the top of my class. So many people were shocked to find out that I wasn’t going to college, many even trying to convince me otherwise. I know that they had my best interests at heart, but at the time I could think of nothing else that was going to satisfy me. Now, as a 24 year old man, I am able to say that, in a lot of ways, I am living my dream. However, the stress of making something out of nothing, the continued fear of failure, and the constant reminders that I’m no longer seeing much growth in my career is getting increasingly difficult to deal with. I feel like a ball of stress. I can feel myself aging and every day feels like a race against some imaginary clock. I have had opportunities that I have turned down due to them being structured in a way that could be considered taking advantage of me, but my peers who took on similar opportunities seem to be doing much better than I am. So I constantly struggle with wondering what could have been in those scenarios. This is all super abstract, I know. But porn has been my outlet for stress, sadness, pain, depression, any negative emotion you could think of, for as long as I can remember. But it’s a poison that only helps for a moment. When all is said and done, all it does is make everything worse. Makes me waste time that I already feel I don’t have. Makes me feel unmotivated in a career where self-motivation is the most important factor. It makes my stress worse. But again, it’s all I know. So trying to stop myself from turning to it is only exacerbating my problems. I know it’s going to get worse before it gets better, but I don’t know how much more of this stress I can take. I can feel myself becoming an angrier person, and I hate that. I’m just so constantly overwhelmed. Anyway, if you read this, thank you. I know it was a lot, and most of it probably doesn’t even make any sense considering I didn’t want to include any personal identifiers. I just feel like writing this stuff out might help me.