So, as the title says, I am a 21 year old male. Today, I type this from my apartment with nothing but hopes for the future and appreciation for my past. Before I explain why I appreciate my past, I’ll try to go through what it was like as quickly as possible.
(you can skip the bracketed section if you don’t care about my slow descent into complete debauchery; also skip it if you are worried about being triggered)
As a boy I played soccer and spent a lot of time with my friends. I had an amazing life. I was outgoing and a complete clown. I look back on those days with a smile. The vitality that I had and the absolute self confidence is something that I feel myself moving towards again every day. It is a goal of mine.
Fast forward to the beginning of my adolescence. I became addicted to video games and porn. I quit sports. I still talked with girls and had plenty of friends. This continued to ring true, but I would hang out with my friends outside of school less and less frequently for a good part of my high-school years. During highschool I only had sex with one girl due to my crippling anxiety of what girls would think of my penis size (average). I guess this could be attributed to all of the porn watching.
Anyways, what is relevant on this subreddit is my porn habits. It started off when I was young. Just looking at SI swimsuit magazines and stuff with my friends. Sporting proud and impotent bon bons. Nothing big. Then, I started watching videos online. It is interesting to see how steadily things got more extreme. The videos started out with mainly lesbian and softcore scenes. Female solo masturbation. The works. This was from age 13-14. At age 15, I got into hentai.
I always liked anime, and Hentai was amazing to me. I got to see my favorite characters naked. Getting railed.
So, it was hentai and hardcore porn at the age of 16. I was extremely picky and would go through material for hours. Opening up many tabs. Trying to find the perfect hit. It was also at the age of 16 that I began being fixated with male genitalia. Something I had never experienced before. I started doing butt stuff, to put it lightly. It was however, on a rare occasion. What was prevalent was that I would start looking at the dicks in videos more and more.
So, at age 17, it was Futanari porn and pornos with big dicks. I searched them out and made sure specifically that the dicks were huge, and I mean huge. There was no male on male action, ever, though.
So, at this point I just accepted that I was full on bisexual. My fetish kept getting more and more intense. I was watching videos of dudes masturbating and female POV videos where I could feel like I was sucking one. (I’m sorry if this is TMI, but I am just being honest here.)
At age 18 and 19 I was obsessed with sissy-hypno. My sexual desires had changed from dominant to submissive. I wanted to serve a man. I still loved hentai and girls with perfect bodies and nice asses, but my fetish dominated my porn searches.
Anyways, it was after I had bought two “real-skin” dildos and been pretending they were actual men that I decided I might have to go on to craigslist to truly fulfill my sexual desires.
I never did it. I came across no-fap on reddit and I realized that my addiction was completely changing me. It was an obsession. It was a dark secret that nobody else knew about. I knew it had to change.
Since then, I have cut PMO out cold turkey. I did 90 days hard mode and then I continued on to have relationships with real girls. Lots of one night stands testing the waters. I feel attracted to real women unlike I had during those years of obsession. I feel confident again, like I did as a child. I am testing my horizons and consistently going beyond my comfort zone, which I feel that NoFap has been a catalyst for. I no longer feel attracted to male genitalia and I threw my dildos away because I don’t want to have any secrets.
This community changed me. I could have continued down that path, but you guys stopped me. Two years later, I am paying for my own apartment and following my dreams. I look forward to nothing more than the future.
I write this now because I realized that I never paid the community back. I hope that someone will see this and realize that their addiction, or not even addiction, but habit, is holding them back. If something isn’t good for you, then it is time to learn to say no to it. It is possible to do the 90 day challenge in hard mode, never go back to porn, and then lead a successful life.
The addiction will NOT follow you, as long as YOU change. You need to realize that the addiction is a manifestation of who you are or the lack there-of. That is why those who are successful with no-fap report so many positive changes in their life. Without those changes they never would have made it to begin with :). So, this is my way of dispelling the mystique of NoFap to a degree.
There is a quote from a TED talk, and I can’t remember which it is from, but it goes like this:
“The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.”
So, connect to the world. To whom you are. Do all of this while trying to abstain from PMO. The pieces will fall together. Keep at it brothers.
(Quick edit: view my response to RedPulse if you feel there were some things I wasn’t clear on.)
LINK – My journey as a 21 year old male. Conquering porn addiction and changing my life.
by KeepGoingSon
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