When I was growing up, I was a very confident kid. Even though I was in elementary school, I remember always feeling very sure of myself and it seemed like I always had a bunch of different girls who liked me.
Things started to change in Junior High though when all of my friends started to hit puberty and I didn’t; I started to feel very self-conscious about myself and eventually turned to this really cool thing that I had just learned about called masturbation to comfort myself. Even though nothing came out, it still felt really good, and I began to do it on a regular basis to help relieve stress and distract myself from the fact that I felt completely helpless when it came to actually attracting real girls.
Around the time I actually did hit puberty, about half way through my freshman year in high school, I discovered pornography. It seemed like there was a whole new world of things that I could look at while masturbating to make the experience even better, I was now more hooked than ever.
However, just because I had hit puberty, didn’t mean I had become any sort of ladies man, and porn (although I really didn’t know it at the time) was a big contributing factor to that. I still lacked confidence in myself and the few girls I did tell that “I liked them” all told me they would rather just be friends, which in turn made me just turn to pornography and masturbation even more so for comfort.
At the beginning of my senior year of high school, I realized I had a problem and sent a text to one of my good friends who I knew didn’t watch porn or masturbate in hopes that he would help keep me honest, and it worked. As time went on, I began to become more confident, I felt like my friendships were improving and I eventually was able to ask a girl out for real with my newfound confidence and she said yes, eventually becoming my girlfriend.
Well, I was good now right, I had the girlfriend I had always wanted, I could go back to porn now and everything would be fine…or so I thought. When I started watching porn again, I could feel our relationship going downhill, it just felt like I was putting the porn over her, I was hooked again. We eventually ended up breaking up, the “main reason” being that she was going out of state for college soon, but I knew that phone had lead to a decline in our relationship, however, instead of stopping, I felt like I had nothing to lose so I just kept on going.
It has been about 5 months since then, and in a lot of ways I was starting to feel like I did before I went on my first no porn streak, less confident in myself and less able to interact with girls. Although a few of the good habits that I started on my first streak were still there, I felt like I wasn’t going anywhere with myself, so on November 1st, I figured it would be a good time to start fresh, I found this community (which has really helped me out so far), and I began on another non-PMO streak.
To be honest, I’m typing this because I’ve had a really bad urge almost all day and I’ve almost relapsed multiple time today and I needed to get my mind off it, and I really think it has helped.
I know this was a little long but I just really needed to get a lot of this stuff out there just for my own sake.
By u/Nivixboss
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