Great thread.
I am slightly older (36) than most you guys, and discovered GYE in Pesach of 2016. It was the gateway for me, and I have had some good sobriety, though a major life transition over the summer has meant that I really had to recommit to my 12 Step Program to get back to the derech this Fall. I thank Hashem every night for a day of sobriety (55), and I ask him every morning to grant me just one more.
About this issue of being hard on yourself and remorse after a fall...The important thing about a fall, in my opinion, is that you learn from it, specifically, about the patterns that you are trying to break. This is addiction! And for that, the formal framework of a 12 Step group (even online!) can be very useful. According to GYE, I can see that I had a streak of 164 days during my first year in Recovery. I cannot decide anymore whether that is "long" or "short." He point is to ask for a day and to be grateful for a day. Really! Not to try and "hold your breath" for a day; or stack days up. So, what I discovered in the 12 Step groups is that the falls taught me a lot about the succession of events and feelings that let to the acting out...And just observing your feelings in a new, heightened way, turning all that analytical power that you have in your brain, developed in yeshiva and elsewhere, on to your own feelings, sometimes, in an honest and unvarnished way for the first time, can allow you to see things in slow-motion next time. That's when you catch yourself; put new fences, use new tools, and swerve out of the way, b'ezrat Hashem, the next time the addiction comes barreling down on you with the force of a freight train.