I am truly scared for my future... (Long Read)

After a long time debating whether I had a problem with it, it’s finally time to admit it and try to help myself and eventually help others. I have to be honest, I don’t know what to expect from this, I’m even pretty skeptical about the benefits. Not just the general benefits, but if it will help me in my specific case. But at this point it’s the only thing I haven’t tried. At this particular point in my life it’s going to be the absolute hardest thing I’m ever going to attempt. So here’s my story and why I’m scared. I am a 29 year old male and I have a very bad problem.

Growing up I always had a fascination with sex, I remember as a kid (under 10) I would sneak into my older brother’s bedroom and look at his playboy magazines. I remember trying to pick out naked women on the scrambled adult channel. I remember sneaking and ordering adult pay per views over the phone (since it was automated, it was easy) assuming I would never get caught. I feel like I’ve been addicted to women/arousal my entire life.

My preteen and teenage years were even worse, I was so bad about it that I even found myself reaching for myself in public places, I never wanted to be caught, but the excitement of getting off in public was addictive to me. I lost my virginity at age 14 to a girl that my best friend at the time was dating and to this day I regret and feel terrible about it. But even with the idea of being able to get girls, I was still addicted to the orgasm, the arousal, the excitement. It has been a multiple time per day thing for the past approx. 17 years. Even with girlfriends I still had to masturbate daily. Even with sex I had to masturbate daily, multiple times.

I got in a relationship with the girl of my dreams (at the time) when I was 16 years old. We hit it off very quickly and fell for each other hard. We were together for 3 years, though only the first year was good. We never had sex for that whole time. Which of course led me to masturbate extremely often. Long story short, she continually betrayed me, insulted me, and cheated on me for the latter 2 years of our relationship, then broke up with me through a text after finding her current husband. This of course destroyed me and led me down a road of hating women irrationally because of this one bad experience.

Over the next 10 years I became worse and worse and worse with my masturbation and porn. I essentially swore off the idea of ever being in a relationship with a woman again. I took her older sister out on a date the following summer after we broke up and we even messed around. I thought I was a stud for being able to pull my ex girlfriends older sister, and yet it didn’t help with my addiction. I even had a very awesome freaky girlfriend for 3 days that following winter, and THAT is when I first started to notice something was terribly wrong.

This girl was awesome, she fell for me, she had a killer body, she wasn’t afraid to have fun or drive an hour to see me, or show me off to her friends. And to top it off she was fun in the bedroom... but I couldn’t get it up. My entire world started crashing at this point because I couldn’t figure out why this was happening. I’m 22 years old with this amazing girl naked on top of me, and I can’t get up. I immediately felt emasculated, I felt worthless, I felt like a fucking failure. I can get hard to a fucking porn but not to the real thing? What the hell was happening? I broke up with her 3 days after we started our relationship because I was embarrassed. She even told me it was ok and I could “practice” with her as much as I wanted. But I was defeated and played it off as if it was her fault for moving too fast. I hated myself and I still do. I decided porn and masturbation were key to the universe be.

This started my incredible downspiral into hell. Though I still hooked up with women intermittently, I was depressed and none of it worked out. I was even able to pull a woman 14 years older than me within the same year and even she was sexy and awesome to be around, and she was also the type to be proud to have me. But I actively avoided having sex with her because I just knew in my heart I would fail and be embarrassed again, so we just did foreplay and that was it, which by the way, can still halfway work for me for some reason.

The porn and masturbation became my daily routine, I didn’t have a job for a long time due to a chronic illness I was diagnosed with in my very young years which probably played into my depression but it never really seemed to play a big part in the depression as far as I’m aware. I would just sit at home, lift weights, masturbate, play video games, masturbate, eat, masturbate, watch porn, masturbate, watch another porn, masturbate, go to bed around 4 in the morning, masturbate, wake up at 2 in the afternoon and start the process over again. Hell, I would even masturbate for a few seconds between rounds of Call of Duty. It was just complete second nature to me. Sometimes upwards of 10 times a day.

The porn I watched had to be more and more extreme. In the beginning, the average stuff would get me off. Even pictures of women’s cleavage would send me over the edge. But it all became bland. The stuff some people find crazy was boring to me. It has gotten so bad that even the most extreme, borderline gross things have become the standard just to get off. My biggest fetishes though is MILF porn (friend’s mom), and women cheating (probably my internalized coping with the cheating that still bothers me from 10 years ago). But it can’t just be any porn, it has to be very specific, so specific that I can’t even really describe what makes it worth watching to me.

It has gotten to the point now that I am truly afraid for my future. I feel like it’s affecting me physically as well as the obvious mental/emotional destruction.

The reason I mentioned that at this point in my life it’s going to be the hardest thing I EVER do is because of the situation I’m currently in with my health. In 2017 I had a very bad undiagnosed intestinal infection that went untreated for a year which led me into what we believe to have been severe sepsis. I will spare you the details of what happened during the sepsis but just know it affected my brain so bad that reality didn’t feel real. I developed massive insomnia due to it and still have not fully recovered from the post sepsis syndrome.

My brain still doesn’t work the way it did before, my desire/motivation/inspiration/creativity is all but gone for whatever reason. My sleep is still terrible, been averaging 4-6 hours a night for the past 2 years which I know is not even close to enough. I have not had a full night of sleep since I went into sepsis. Although I now have a fairly steady work from home job, I do HIIT cardio every day, I eat healthy, I read, I learn, I still play video games. But it feels like at this point in my life I’m just existing, it’s very hard to explain. It’s almost like I’m straddling the line between sleep and wake constantly. Every day feels like the same day just broken up with a nap. I never feel refreshed, and I never feel awake. I actually never even feel sleepy, I’ve currently been up since 7 AM and it’s now 2 AM and I don’t even partially feel tired. Assuming where I was so close to death for so long, it may have fried something in my hormone department for melatonin/serotonin/dopamine . I’m also apparently severely dehydrated seeing as I am drinking close to 200oz of water per day, 32oz milk, 32oz fruit and vegetable smoothie in the morning, and only pissing 4-5 times a day.

But that’s why I feel this is going to be so hard to accomplish because other than masturbation, I can’t feel any kind of emotion other than stress. The masturbation doesn’t really fill me with euphoria at this point, but it feels like it temporarily levels me out. But I also notice that when I do masturbate a lot, it seems to make everything much worse. I have a much harder time going to sleep, my intestines feel worse, I feel doom, my body temperature won’t regulate, I just don’t feel ok. So I’m thinking that by doing this, it should help me heal faster physically and mentally. Because even if I do heal physically and I’m still addicted to masturbation and porn. What’s the point if I can’t satisfy a real woman or feel what a woman is supposed to make me feel because of my self inflicted impotence?

I apologize for the long read, but I just wanted to tell my full story. There are details I left out because I feel it’s just too gross to mention and I’m not quite ready to put my entire skeleton collection on display.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope to become a regular here and share my journey.

 

Thank you for the responses! I woke up today with a total of ~4 hours of sleep but I am ready to give this thing a real shot.

You are absolutely right, I have already took the first steps I felt necessary to begin to accept, forgive myself and others for the things in my past. I felt that was a very important first step to getting on the right path.

It’s definitely going to be tough. I feel if I was in a bit of a healthier position it would be easier for me, or maybe not, maybe I wouldn’t even be attempting this in the first place if I wasn’t unhealthy and desperate now. It’s possible the darkness was just what I needed to see the light. And don’t get me wrong, that’s not saying NoFap is easy just because you’re healthy, I just wish I could have done this from a more enthusiastic proactive place rather than a reactive desperation.
One thing that really seems to give me some motivation for future urges is something I read (I can’t recall where) that says it can make it easier for some people dealing with addictions to any destructive behavior to rather than say “no I’m not going to do it” you tell yourself “no I’m not a person that does that”, and since it comes from a place of being instead of a place of action it can have profound effect for some. Also, I have definitely considered a therapist for this as well as the post sepsis syndrome and will look into it this weekend. Thank you very much for the words of encouragement!

Thank you very much for the advice, I will definitely add that to my arsenal in this battle. Life is definitely full of trials and hard times. I know a lot of people aren’t religious and don’t believe in an afterlife, but one thing that helps me and maybe other spiritual/religious people overcome hard times and trials is the thought that by proving that I won’t let something bring me down, that I will fight through those trials to the bitter end, that I will be looked at with better judgment in the next life. That’s just one way I try to encourage myself. Because honestly, what’s 100 years to eternity, right? 100 years of (edit) Hard Work for an eternity of peace.
And that’s not me saying that masturbation or porn is “evil” and the act of doing it will keep you out of Heaven or whatever someone may believe in. It’s more coming from a place of knowing what I’m doing is destroying me and I’m actively allowing myself to be destroyed by it, that is what I feel is looked at unfavorably.


Again thank you for the responses, it’s greatly appreciated.

Today starts Day 1. To anyone who is also on Day 1, you’re not doing this alone!