I’m Tiago. I’d been putting off writing this for a good few months, wondering whether there was any point in writing about it at all. I’ll start with my whole story.
When I was about eleven, I found out where I could watch naked women on screen. It was new to me and it made me very curious, so I’d sit comfortably in an armchair and carelessly watch the women writhing about, even though my mother was making breakfast right next door in the kitchen, knowing nothing about it. Later I stopped, because it no longer interested me that much. The problem came back somewhere around sixteen, when I started watching normal porn online. After every time I masturbated I had terrible pangs of conscience, without knowing what was really causing them. I thought it was just groundless delusions in my head and that I had to ignore them. Since then I don’t remember ever taking a real break from fapping to porn. There were longer and shorter periods of abstinence, but I never planned to give it up. Through school I was literally a loser. I felt disgust for myself, and because of that I was shy and quiet, I avoided eye contact, and to text a girl I liked I needed at least a few days to think it over, inventing different scenarios of what would happen next and how she would react. I won’t even mention class presentations, because then I just wanted the ground to swallow me up. It’s also worth mentioning that so far I haven’t had the luck to get close to a girl — I’ve never even kissed anyone, let alone anything more. Everything stood still until, more than a year ago, I came across some articles about porn completely by chance.
I remember the shock I felt, and how many years seemed to slip through my fingers as I realised how porn was destroying me. I started quitting straight away. During that time I signed up for a gym, kept to a diet and started working on myself. Unfortunately, the longest I’ve lasted without it so far is just under three weeks. Even though I’m still stuck in porn, I’ve changed dramatically for the better. I started going out, talking to people, setting goals and then achieving them. A lot of people who look at me with some distance have confirmed this for me. From a boy full of complexes who was afraid to look at his own reflection in the mirror, I’ve become a confident man. At the moment I work in a call centre, in the sales department, where I can’t complain about a lack of contact with people, because the calls come one after another. I also want to mention that even though I haven’t been there long, they value me as one of the best employees, I’m getting promotions, and I feel great talking to dozens of customers a day. What more could I want? I’m twenty, and I would never have guessed that I’d already have developed this much and, above all, that I’d be earning this much. Everything would be perfect if not for the fact that I’m still stuck in this addiction and can’t cut it out of my life completely. Along the way I even tried getting help from a psychologist, but I wasn’t satisfied with those visits. I know it’s all about dopamine, because I’ve read several books on the subject and I understand how it works. In theory everything is great — as I said, I’m doing well at work, I earn a good amount, I have no problem starting a conversation with anyone, so my brain must be producing plenty of dopamine every day — and yet every now and then I still reach for porn, knowing that it’s limiting me or slowing down my further development. When my birthday came round not long ago, I decided this was the definitive end of porn, because when you leave your teenage years behind you have to give up certain habits. I lasted a week and a half. During that oh-so-long stretch I met a girl I liked, though I couldn’t say why — I just felt she had something special. That motivated me even more to break the habit, and then this morning I thought I’d put porn on just out of curiosity, only for a few seconds. You can guess how this story ends. I thought it was high time to finish with this, because it’s starting to feel pathetic to me. It’s been more than a year of knowing what kind of addiction I’m in, and I still watch. Even so, I think these months of fighting haven’t gone to waste, because I know how much has changed in me in that time. To be completely happy, I need to break with it for good and find the partner I’ve been waiting for. I’m pretty frustrated by now, as you can tell from the fact that I’m writing this after three in the morning when I have to get up for work tomorrow. I decided to write this to confide in someone and get at least part of this crushing weight off my chest.
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