Hello everybody,
Today is an important day for me because I reached 30 days without PMO (challenge is PM but actually I don’t have a girlfriend and I’m not interested in occasional sex so.. no PMO) so I’m writing this post to say thank you, to share with you my feelings and this little (but significant for me) piece of my story.
I have had a few difficult moments in these 30 days, especially half the way and in the last days, but I succeeded so I think it is useful to make a report of how I feel after a month clean.
I don’t feel I have “superpowers”, but I feel more creative, I have more ideas (for example about marketing for my business), and I have a clearer view on reality. I found myself more social (not web-social, real-life-social!), I’m listening more carefully to others and I’m more interested to friends, and also more tolerant. I noticed my time is spent better (reading, studying, playing music, staying with friends) and this lifts up my mood.
My will is stronger: initially this challenge seemed really hard, nearly impossible, and my loneliness was a big issue for me, but now they are resized, smaller. Many things still looks big and unreachable (I’ll explain further) but if I was wrong about some things, I may be wrong also about other things!
One of the things I think is helping me the most, is to share my feelings about my problem with others, and to listen to how others feel, and it’s a really relieving sensation when someone feel like you. In January, I had a talk with a recently known friend, and she told me about her addiction to heroin, so I told her about mine to porn. It was the first time I revealed this secret to someone. We talked about our problems, we shared experiences and feelings, some things are really different but some other things are just the same. She’s clean from past a year, fighting her war with determination. I found a friend in her (never considered her for romance because she is much younger than me), this is helping me a lot. And I found a lot of people fighting battles like mine here on NoFap, some posts I read here has been meaningful, so thank you for being here.
Loneliness is a big weight on my shoulders, it has been one of the things that in the last year often pushed me to PMO. Obsessive thinking had become usual for me, many times a day I imagined, daydreamed about a girlfriend, about situations, romances, especially ad bedtime, when my loneliness seem to come knocking harder. In the first week of my 30 days challenge I felt that these thoughts were dangerous because they could easily lead me to fall back to PM, so I decided to try to stop them too. It is very hard to change this, because it has become a habit, but every time I’m able to avoid it I feel more energy available to me to do other things, and I see clearly, I was wasting those energies in obsessive thinking. I believed those thoughts was soothing my loneliness but now I see that they only cost me a lot of energy, giving me back nothing else than illusions. I’m still fighting with this, I often find myself thinking but this is happening less and less frequently, and when it happens, I’m increasingly able to stop it and to focus on something else. As I write before, many things still looks big and difficult to change, and this is one of them, but I’m working on it.
Two other things I want to add as commitments for the next months are to keep my apartment ordered and clean (I’m a little messy, and moreover there are some minor works I should do to fix my house that I keep postponing – I should do these) and to regularize my sport practice. I’m doing exercises often but I’m still discontinuous and I want to try being more disciplined in these two things.
In January I joined a meditation group, because I thought it can help me some way, and I found that it can help me in many ways. I guess it’s not the same for everyone, but for me it works really well. It is still difficult to focus, to free the mind from thoughts, but in this kind of meditation (Sumarah) the most important thing is to accept yourself in that moment, not forcing your mind to do something but gently guiding your mind and listening to the inner part of yourself. And I’m learning a lot from this, exploring my loneliness, my fears, my desires, knowing myself better. And the more I know myself, the more I like myself. This amazed me, and I wonder what I still have to discover. It is not only gold, there is still a lot of mud inside me I have to dive through, but I’m already used to feel frustrated, you know, so this doesn’t scare me. And the beauty I found inside surely worth the effort.
Meditation also guided me to rediscovered my contact with nature. When I was a child, before porn came to my life, I loved being in the nature, my parents often brought me on mountains, lakes, shores, they gave me the opportunity to feel I am part of this beauty. Then I started closing myself in PMO, losing my contact with reality, with the gift of life, with nature. In the last month I went to mountain every free weekend I had, with some friends, and I felt like when I was a child, feeling the grip of my hands on the rocks, the wind on my face, enjoying the peace and the silence of places far from hurry, appreciating the complexity of trees and watching at the flight of a hawk. I think that we are part of this beauty, and that this beauty is part of us, it resonates with something deep inside us because we are similar.
One last thing I want to write is a quote. I started reading some books I bought some time ago but I never read, and one of them (Healing Anger – Dalai Lama) has been really useful to understand a part of my worries and anger. In this book I found a phrase that helped me a lot, and I want to share it:
“Why be unhappy about something if you can change it? And if you can’t, how will being unhappy help?”
I feel this phrase is telling me: don’t worry, you can change.
And in those meditations something inside me was telling me the same thing.
And those rocks under my hands told me the same.
And that friend, and NoFap, and these 30 days… a lot of beautiful things and facts and persons are telling me this same thing: you can change.
So, let’s change.
I’m at day 31, won a battle, ready for the next: 90 days without PM.
Thank you for reading my words, keep your guard up and go on!
Advices and comments are always welcome.
P.s. English is not my first language, sorry for any writing errors
LINK – 30 days no PM(O), one battle won.
by italian82
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