Day one

I never really wanted to believe it could get this bad. It always felt like something that was temporarily ridiculous but in the long run, manageable. It's only gotten worse through the years, though. First it was pictures on dial-up at 3 in the morning so my parents wouldn't catch me. Then flash games came out. By the time I was in college in 2006, video had hit and by 2008 or 2009, the tube sites. I spent a huge chunk of that time barely studying, avoiding social interactions, playing video games, smoking weed, and crawling tube sites. That all stayed pretty stable for a while. At that time, I thought weed was the only problem. That if I could l kick weed, the rest of my life would fall in line. Back then, you needed like 20 kilos of hulking, humming electronics to disappear into the internet. It was isolated, and you could free yourself if you could stay out of your room. Then came smart phones and 4k and p games that weren't just crappy flash cartoons anymore. My gaming addiction and my p addiction started merging and morphing. I quit weed and the other addictions picked up the slack. And through it all, no one knew. Maybe they suspected, but no one knew. I had girlfriends, long term successful relationships, an adventurous (some would say enviable) life. I built a very effective vocabulary of lies. Missing a social interaction became diarrhea or home work or needing time at home after a stressful week. All night binges that left me looking like a zombie became insomnia. And I learned just how little sleep I could operate on. Sometimes I'd overdo it stay up all night, and miss work. Free p doesn't look so free anymore when it starts cutting days out of your paycheck.

I don't really know how many times I've tried to quit. The last successful stretch was before smart phones, I know that much. Now that the internet's here, there, and everywhere, I know I have to do something else. The games are only getting better, the devices more connected, and p more mainstream acceptable. I imagine it's similar to what it would have felt like trying to quit cigarettes in the 60's. There's just no escaping the ubiquity. The path out has grown ever more narrow, cutting the cord is approaching impossible, and I now have less self control over this than at any point previous in my life.

I'm hoping this site can help, because I really don't want to find out how much worse this can get. So here's to day one, I guess.

PlantingTrees said:

So here's to day one, I guess.

Click to expand...

I just joined recently as well. We're in this together. Keep posting here and hold yourself accountable. If you relapse, get right back on. It's not over until you give up for good. Have you read through all of YBOP and watched Gabe and Noah's videos? It really helps to research as much as humanly possible in order to understand how destructive porn can be for some people. It can be really really hard to resist urges. You know what your life is like with porn, what is it without porn?

You should take up meditation for 5 minutes once or twice a day. Becoming more mindful will help resist urges. Get to the gym and work on yourself. The task seems daunting and impossible, but I really recommend reading success stories on YBOP and this forum, it helps give me motivation. Good luck.

The fact you experience it as ubiquitous and impossible to quit is actually part of the disease. When one is sick, the whole world appears sick.

Perhaps the first thing that strikes us (myself included), as you write, is the disbelief. Disbelief that p can really creep on you like that, and that your own ways of combating it progressively fail and just become absorbed as a defense-mutation of the addiction itself. It becomes more difficult to give it up, let alone seeing a world for yourself without it.

But you've made it here. Something, somewhere, in you, refuses to be entirely annexed by this thing and it's fighting back. Take that spark and turn it into lightning that'll smite the p out of you for good!

Thinking about it and starting a journal is a good essential step, but you have to do more if you're really serious. Educate yourself, try to figure out what was it that made you relapse before, what are your triggers, what do you plan on replacing p with (usually, this needs to be a multi-pronged response, as p tended to be this "magical fix it all pill")? And how do you plan on holding yourself accountable?

You write really well, by the way! Keep the journal going and keep fighting! I wish you lots of strength and hope.