I’ve been off porn for a week now, mainly because I noticed the problem myself. I need to get this off my chest and find some support.
The worst thing is that, having just turned 23, the only certain thing in my life has been that, for as long as I can remember, I’ve always reached for porn. As I’ve read happens to a lot of people, ordinary porn usually wasn’t enough, and lately I’d even gone as far as gay porn, although I’m heterosexual. At 17, after failing even at trying to pick girls up, I told myself I just didn’t have it in me. Thousands of articles and a few books on seduction led me into self-development, but I didn’t realise I was overvaluing everything and everyone in that world.
The only thing I was missing was self-worth, because deep down I always felt worse because of the constant fapping. Of course it wasn’t so bad that I wanted to end my life or anything like that. I value life, and for a while now I’ve started to value my mental health. Two years ago I met a beautiful, intelligent woman. Things between us moved very quickly, we ended up in bed, and already during foreplay I felt something was wrong, that I wasn’t getting hard. Back then I didn’t yet know what was wrong. I put it down to stress and other reasons that weren’t true.
Shortly after we broke up, in the summer, I had the chance to take a course in emotional intelligence and meditation. My life started to change, but porn was still in it. Meditation started doing its work, healing me, my soul and my mind through understanding. Although those moments of quiet managed to clear me out and were already pointing to my erection problem back then, I couldn’t understand it. I went abroad on a student exchange, where I met lots of wonderful, open people and saw a lot. I tried to build up my self-worth through my experiences, by looking for more and more new adventures. But all that enthusiasm disappeared whenever I put porn on. I’ll add that for me it didn’t always end at once; sometimes it was as many as three times a day. I’d perfected hiding it. Just like the sense of inferiority that was always hiding somewhere inside me.
Only now do I understand where it came from; that’s how long it took to sink in. So much pain and so many awkward situations, so many great women in my life, and I couldn’t give as much as I wanted to, because I lacked both the energy and the ability. For some people, faith is what warns them off doing this. It wasn’t like that for me, because of my views: I’m agnostic. But the truth is that we know best what’s wrong with us; our body gives us that information, though not all of us can read it. The urge to fap is very strong right now, and I’ll admit honestly that after being used to it for so long, my body doesn’t know what’s happening. My motivation is that, now that I’ve quit, I’ll finally get to experience sex, and I already feel better in terms of my values. But I’m no expert, and I don’t yet know how to redirect that desire and energy. There’s one thought I have, and I feel it’s the right one: breaking up with porn has very similar symptoms to breaking up with a woman.
No published comments yet.