Upgrading my French Defense

I played the French Defense for over 10 years. I drifted towards the safer lines to avoid tactical oversights while trying to beat my opponents through deep positional understanding. I recently experienced a huge performance boost thanks to identifying some dietary oversights and I am now developing more respect for these positions since the challenge should make for shorter games.

This structure is annoying because the monstrous space advantage, spearheaded by the e-pawn, supports white’s standard kingside attack. My game plan involves chipping away at the center pawns with c5, f6 and sometimes h6-g5, all while holding off castling so I don’t waste my king’s time moving him into the eye of the storm…