An update, 2 years on from 'recovery'.

Here we are then, 2 years on from what sounded like a 'happily ever after' ending from my last past. I have to admit, it's a good feeling looking back at my younger self enjoying the fruits of a porn-free life for the first time. You get a thrilling high when you fall for a girl for the first time - something most of us don't get to experience until later in life when porn is the easy substitute of our youth, and it's satisfying reliving that moment through this forum. I feel a bit like a proud dad in a way.

I won't make this post very long, but I have some things to note after the last thread had such an incredible response (still makes me giddy).

To start this ramble, I want to talk about short-term highs. As we are all aware, watching porn is an intense high, perhaps one of the most intense and easily available highs in the world. When we become addicted to this high (the highest of highs), what's left in our lives HAS to be some kind of high, else nothing will come close to the feeling of watching porn. For me, watching porn came with the additional personality traits of smoking weed, gaming, social media etc, essentially nothing of true value encompassed my living. This isn't some revelation; every person on this website could agree that these traits come hand in hand with pornography. The point I want to make follows on from a line in first paragraph - 'You get a thrilling high when you fall for a girl for the first time'.

I won't get into the details, but the relationship with this girl recently ended after a long downward spiral. I think what bugs me now looking back at my old post is how I make out that quitting porn is a gateway into a life-long high, that you will find the girl of your dreams and have lovely long sex until the sun devours us all - THIS FEELING is a high, and will not last, and perhaps this realisation is more important than quitting porn itself. Having real sex is a high, relationships are a high, improving your life quality is a high, but this is all they are - highs. Once they disappear you have to be comfortable living life working on the mundane, or be comfortable being uncomfortable, then learning from it.

After the high of my relationship, I immediately went back to porn as I didn't know how else to deal with such an event, and for several weeks was living life as I used to as a young teen (wasting evenings away watching filth). It is horrible. What I didn't realise until after the relapse was just how much I had progressed as a person. I began finding people irritating, spending entire days on YouTube, drinking heavily - things I hadn't done in YEARS. My emotions reverted to a soulless numbing. But the lesson learned was to be comfortable in the uncomfortable, know that highs are temporary and that pain follows, and most importantly that this is living. You cannot live the highs without living the lows, and who'd want to live a flatlined life kept afloat by porn? From experience, not me.

I think what else this taught me is how this addiction never goes away. I talk in my post about it being a life-long battle, but I don't think I fully grasped the extent that this is meant. I was the definition of cured - 2 year relationship, bloody good sex, no urges - yet in the space of a few weeks I was completely back at square one. The only positive from the second time round being that I knew it was possible to escape, which I have again, and is a message I should drill into the minds of everyone on this site;

It is ALWAYS possible to recover, regardless of how many times you relapse or how far down the rabbit hole you are. You're all kings awaiting a better life.

Thanks again for your kind messages x

 

Cheers man! You too.