Hi. My name is Josh and I’m thirty. My story began in my first year of high school, when I was about fifteen. I had heard of masturbation before, but it seemed weird to me and I had never tried it. Then a friend mentioned it in some completely different context, and that was the trigger. I decided to do it for the first time, and that’s where it started. Even though it felt good for a moment, afterwards I felt awful. It’s hard to describe exactly, but you feel a kind of guilt you don’t understand. Everyone around you says it’s nothing bad, but something deep inside says otherwise. A day went by and I did it again. From then on, despite feeling terrible, I did it often, sometimes twice a day. I very quickly discovered that the sensations were stronger if I looked at pictures of naked women. Very quickly ordinary nude pictures got boring; I needed porn. Everything developed very fast.
Life went on. I didn’t notice anything negative in myself apart from growing shyness, more and more frequent bouts of depression and a complete lack of interest in me from the opposite sex. Everyone was surprised by that last part, because I looked pretty good: I’m tall, fairly handsome, and girls should really have liked me. At the time I had no idea masturbation could have any negative effect, except perhaps the low mood after doing it. Once I managed a break from June to December, simply because I’d had enough of the constant guilt. Unfortunately, when I did it that one time, everything came back.
Eventually I was twenty-three, and by pure chance I met a very pretty, very sexy girl. Somehow I managed to win her over. We dated for a while until it came to my first time. It was a disaster. Zero arousal. We were together for a few months and today I remember it with horror. The sex was terrible. She tried, she really tried, but I was partly impotent. The only way I could finish was by masturbating next to her. Fuck, it was humiliating. She broke up with me.
It slowly began to dawn on me that masturbation might be causing this. I seriously cut it down to once a week, and things got a little better. Some time later I managed to start my own business. Unfortunately I was constantly behind with everything. I fell into a kind of cycle where for a few days I would sleep all day and nothing interested me, and then I would catch up on the backlog again. It was the kind of business where I also employed a few young women around my age. That’s where I met my next girlfriend. Surprisingly, things somehow worked between us, even though I was sad almost all the time. I told her I loved her, but I felt as if I wasn’t capable of any deeper feelings. It’s so strange: you feel as if you’re shut inside an aquarium, nothing moves you, and deep down you’re really just waiting to put on a video online. That was the only excitement. When I knew I would do it in the evening, I felt on top of the world.
But back to the story. Unfortunately, it ended for her, even though she was in love with me. I dumped her for someone else because the new one had… big breasts. I was simply looking for new sensations. I wanted to do what I saw in the videos, and I didn’t care about other people’s feelings. I lasted two months with the new one, because she didn’t give me the kind of satisfaction the videos did anyway. When I left her and was on my own, I suddenly felt a kind of happiness. My brain was saying: “Finally you’ve got rid of all of them, now you’ll have more time for masturbation!” Whoever reads this may find it hard to understand or feel what I felt, because I’m describing it quite briefly. I don’t want to write a whole book here, just sketch the situation.
I stayed alone for a while, and of course porn was now the most important thing. I neglected the business, but in some flash of feeling better I took out my first loan and decided to open a second location. Unfortunately I was so burned out that my role was limited to taking on the debt and sorting out the paperwork. I handed the running of it to someone else. Meanwhile, problems appeared in my first business. I won’t describe exactly what happened, but I’ll just say that I fell into a spiral of debt, making worse and worse decisions one after another. OK, someone will say this has nothing to do with masturbation. But I know it does. To put it bluntly, I didn’t give a shit about what was going on around me. Only the evenings with porn mattered; everything else wasn’t my problem, it was somewhere far away. I thought about it all day.
In the meantime I picked up a woman who had got married half a year earlier. Now I regret it, but I did it because I was looking for sex; I wasn’t interested in any feelings. Porn had completely washed out my brain. Her marriage fell apart, and I left her.
In the end the business collapsed completely. The depression got deeper and deeper. I started having trouble finishing even when I masturbated. I constantly had almost purple shadows under my eyes. Two days after masturbating I always got a huge attack of depression, and I was haunted by suicidal thoughts. I cut masturbation down to once every week and a half. But it didn’t help at all. I slept ten hours and still wanted to sleep. I felt as if my head were closed inside a glass jar that isolated me from the world. This went on for almost three years. I found some crappy job just to have any money at all.
Meanwhile, with every year, something strange started happening. When you masturbate, you slowly become invisible to women. I believe masturbation disrupts the production of pheromones. The body probably decides that since it’s getting so much sex, it no longer needs to “attract” any partners. I found a post online where a guy describes similar symptoms. To women you simply become invisible.
But back to the point. I had to hit rock bottom to start getting up. Even though I was taking those breaks of a week and a half, in between there was absolutely nothing I was looking forward to. I had no plans; nothing excited me. The only thing that gave me joy was an evening with porn and masturbation. When I sat down at the computer at ten at night, I thought it would be quick, and it usually lasted up to four hours. In the morning I got up dazed and exhausted, as if I’d run a marathon. I looked at women as objects. I didn’t care what kind of character they had or anything else. I only wanted sex, and I couldn’t count on that anymore either. I was also getting pickier and pickier. I looked for women who resembled porn stars, and we all know the world of porn is a distorted vision of reality.
Eventually I came across that post I mentioned and an online support forum. I dug my heels in and stopped for six weeks. Unfortunately, after six weeks it got me again. I did it a few times, a week apart, until I told myself: “There’s no other way than to end this for good!” As I write this, four weeks have passed since I stopped, and I think that this time it really is the end. Whenever I think about it, I repeat to myself like a mantra: there’s no other way!
The first two weeks were awful. I had headaches, I lost motivation for anything, and I still wasn’t getting enough sleep. After a week I had serious thoughts of suicide. I felt like a loser and alone. I couldn’t see anything ahead of me anymore. But I started looking for things, and I found information that curcumin extract has a very positive effect on how the brain works. (It’s worth reading about; this substance found in curry really has a whole range of positive effects on the body.) I bought a supplement online and take it every day. Curcumin has a big effect on neurotransmitters and so on.
As I said, the first two weeks were awful. Those blackouts, a kind of “lag”: I want to do something and a second later I forget. After those two weeks, things seemed to stabilize. As a side note, I play a well-known online tank game, and I’ve always been a very average player. Suddenly, from the second week, I started getting the kind of results the best players get. I don’t know how it happens; it’s as if my reflexes came back. I don’t know how else to describe it.
Something else is changing too: I’m slowly starting to feel. As if, slowly and timidly, deeper feelings were coming back. I’m starting to pay attention to the world around me. It’s still a bit flat, but it’s only the beginning. And most importantly, I like a girl. But not in a sexual way. Finally, seeing a girl, I felt something not down below but in my chest. Something I probably haven’t felt since eighth grade, when I went through my first love. Maybe she isn’t perfect, but I intend to go up to her and start a conversation next time we see each other. Even if nothing comes of it, I WANT TO BREAK THROUGH. I’m timidly starting to feel that I can do it too, that it’s nothing scary.
Now, as I write this at the end of the fourth week, it would be a real shame to break it off yet again. I’ll do everything I can to make this the final end of porn and masturbation in my life. This is the last call. I’ve started doing some exercises every day before bed. At first it was hard, but now I seem to be breaking through that too, and my body is starting to function somehow. If after four weeks I’m slowly putting out the fire that was consuming me, I think I’ll eventually manage to clear away the ruins in my body and mind. That’s what excites me now; that’s my biggest goal. I’m waiting and looking to the future with hope. I know there will still be bad days, but I know that if I hold on, there’s definitely something at the end of the road. Something positive.
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