Well, I've finally done it. I've successfully stayed away from porn for 90 days. This is the very first time in my life that I have ever accomplished this since taking up that vile addiction almost twenty years ago.
I'm so happy that I was able to accomplish this! Sure, I feel a bit groggy (I took a power nap yesterday afternoon, which made it a bit harder to fall asleep last night. The two bathroom trips didn't help much either), but this is still a huge accomplishment for me.
Even now, I can still remember falling into the trap of porn back in 2004; it feels like a lifetime ago. Since then, I can only look back and see nothing but negative consequences on not only my personality, but also my overall life outcomes. Porn made me secretive, a hypocrite (I come a devout religious family), moody and devoid of confidence and self-esteem. I so much time watching porn over the years that I never used that time to learn important skills or building important relationships. My social skills remained under-developed, I never learned or taught myself important job skills or other skills necessary for becoming independent. As a result, I developed a very warped view of life and relationships, viewing the latter as a mere stepping stone towards or being entirely centred on sex. Every single attractive woman I met became the object of a sexual fantasy, a face to masturbate to when alone in my bed at night. I didn't really think about who she really was or how she would feel knowing that I held her that way in my thoughts. All that mattered was how I felt. When I did attempt to court a woman, it always ended in failure for a variety of reasons, and the humiliation of so many rejections led to me numbing myself with even more porn. My self-esteem got so low and the self-loathing/shame so intense that on many occasions, I even contemplated suicide.
I was seen as weird and even creepy by classmates (granted, there were other reasons involved, but I refuse to believe that porn didn't play a role), disliked by teachers and authority figures and had a strained relationship with immediate family. Speaking of family, it's a miracle that they never gave up on me; many other people would have. I came to see their attempts at curbing my addiction (via parental controls and religious intervention) as annoying or repressive, a testament to my selfish and ungrateful attitude. Yet even they never knew how far down the abyss that I had gone, having developed disgusting fetishes and other compulsive habits. Adding to this, by 2016 I discovered MGTOW, followed by the so-called black pill/incel community two years later. Both ideologies led me to see myself and my overall lack of success as being the fault of societal bias against men (MGTOW) or the result of my newly-perceived ugliness (incels). I even went to work in those days, telling my colleagues that I was ugly and that life had no meaning, something which deeply concerned many of them and led to reports to HR about my comments. Naturally, I lost many jobs due to my poor work ethic, inabilit to get along with people and my overall bad attitude, the latter of which was only made worse by the belief that society was against me. Not to mention I got sucked into the anti-woke ideology as well, spending hours after work (or even during work) listening to YouTube personalities/talking heads criticize every "woke movie," feminism or some other SJWism that they believed was harming society; one minute they were winning the culture war and the very next minute the wokeness was getting worse. All that did was direct my frustration with myself towards an external foe that I could blame my problems on, rather than looking inward and coming to grips with my own personal failures and trying to correct them. You know what they say: be the change that you want to see, but its hard to do that when everything going wrong in your life is automatically the fault of everyone else.
Covid-19 then struck, which changed a lot. After losing my job in 2020, I (reluctantly) went back to school and am now pursuing a bachelor's degree. At first I resisted, viewing college as a cesspool for woke ideology and blue-haired weirdos who would attack anyone with political views different from their own. Clearly, this sensational view was a direct result of listening to the anti-woke crusaders on the internet for hours at a time. Of course, there were still many unresolved issues that I still had to deal with; it took a while for me to cease the self-deprecation and anti-woke sentiments. However, I ended up on the school honour roll for my grades, which greatly boosted my confidence in my academic abilities. For the first time in my life, I finally had an idea of what I wanted to pursue as a life career, something I never decided on for most of my life. It was this newly found confidence that prompted me to want to quit porn last year in July; I installed an app called Freedom on my devices after purchasing a one-year subscription and managed to avoid PMO for 35 days. At the time, that was a record for me, and I remember feeling so proud of myself. I even joined a martial arts gym and took up other extra-curricular activities as well. I even started going out for lunch with a girl I met on campus, but that's actually where things quickly fell apart. I was interested in her, but she wasn't interested in me. When she and then another girl after rejected and ghosted me, I fell into a depression, reliving the same humiliation that I felt from previous rejections. The truth is, I believed a lie that has permeated throughout the Nofap community: the belief that quitting porn will give one superpowers, including being seen as attractive to women. Funny, I've never once heard women who quit porn say the same regarding men. It also didn't help that I had left a lot of other issues unaddressed at the time, such as my work ethic or my financial responsibility, both of which were lacking. I simply did superficial things for a rather shallow goal, basing my happiness and success on whether or not a woman was interested. When this didn't happen, there was no reason to quit PMO, which I promptly returned to by August of that year.
Porn was still part of my life as 2024 rolled around, which led me to a very uncomfortable realization: By the time September rolled around, I would be addicted for twenty whole years. That thought didn't sit well with me at all.
As I spelled out in a previous Nofap post, I tried to compromise by backing up my porn onto one of my external hard-drives. I told myself that if this new attempt at quitting didn't work, then I would return to porn and never bother quitting again. Thankfully, the process was taking so long that I finally just stopped the transfer in a huff and deleted the porn altogether, right then and there (including backups). That was exactly three months ago; I haven't touched the stuff since.
I will however give some details of I have done since. Beginning in April of this year, I discovered a hobby in the form of photography. I had a DSLR that I purchased nearly a decade ago, which I grudgingly pulled out of storage for my schoolwork. I didn't understand a thing about photography, but one of my colleagues just happens to be an award-winning photographer. She showed me the ropes and has been guiding me on important principles. Fast forward to today, I have photographed seven concerts and five sporting events, which has taken me to six different cities (in three different counties) around the province, with a whopping seven more planned trips to different cities for the same intention. Suffice to say, quitting porn was so easy this time around because I gave myself so little time for it. Some days, I would be up by 4:30 in the morning and not reach home until after 10 p.m. Furthermore, when I do have free time, I usually spend it volunteering in my community, giving back whenever I can and forming meaningful relationships with people along the way. I've also come to question and ultimately reject the black pill, MGTOW and all the anti-woke nonsense that I use to lend my ears to for so many years, choosing instead to focus on my own personal flaws instead of trying to find other people to blame for my own personal failures.
That said, I still have a long way to go. I still masturbate, but I plan on minimizing that more than I already have (I tend to sleep better without it). I also plan to take better care to save money and eventually get back into shape via gym attendance, which I gave up after my previous relapse. I'm also repairing the relationship with my family and maximizing the skills that I learn at work. I also need to work on setting up proper boundaries and improving my social/communication skills as well. Rome wasn't built in a day, so I hope to have improved these skills greatly by the end of this summer.
I'll keep posting about my improvements in the coming months.
