An Essay I Wrote About Porn Addiction I Couldn't Bring Myself To Post On My Blog (Triggers)

There is a trailer park in my mind where a perpetual thunderstorm rages; the moms and dads howl and punch at each other as lightning flashes, each blow they land booms with the thunder, and the little children are tossed about like debris in the wind. When I close my eyes I can go there; I can feel my heart electric in the cool darkness as little feet pull me toward whatever trauma is taking place just beyond my bedroom door. I can still run my hand along the edges of the holes pockmarking the walls of the hallway between my bedroom and theirs, each about the size of my dad’s fist or foot. I can hear her weeping as I approach one slight step at a time and feel the crisp thwack of leather piercing air and slapping hard on my mother’s skin and reverberating forever in the tombs of my heart. I can see him above her, belt in hand. I can hear his tone, sarcastic, through slurred speech but can’t make out the words. Mom lays fetal on the bed, her face caked in tears, her ribcage gyrating between gasping breaths, moaning in honest agony.

Are we all just scared children? Am I? I know he must have been scared. I know what it is to ride helpless in a body that is doing things I hate. I have tried to reconcile these kinds of scenes with everything that came later, the obsessions and compulsions, my self hatred and recklessness, all the selfish choices. Probably there is a line that can be drawn. What a terrible thought, that before we have any self determination at all, some shit that happens to us that punches a hole in the metaphorical boats of our lives so that we spend the years we should be learning to navigate the ocean of adulthood just trying to bail out water.

All my life I have wanted change. I wanted to become the kind of little boy who did his homework and who didn’t make scenes in class. I’ve wanted to stop picking my nose, to stop getting in fights, to stop crying in public. I’ve wanted to stop my mom having to pick me up from school because I overturned a desk in Art class, or because I threw a stool at the music teacher. Always I’ve been trying to stop doing the wrong things and start doing the right ones. Unfortunately I’ve wanted this change to happen sort of generally, and life is not lived generally; life is lived on particular tuesday nights, and on a given particular tuesday night it was likely that my young self was recovering from some particular horror, and it was more important that I allow myself the most pleasure possible than to do the thing that needed doing. Then on Wednesday morning, when the shame comes, it’s very difficult to have another epiphany of change. At some point another voice becomes louder. Embrace the truth it says. This is who you are. You are not someone who can do the things he says he’s going to do. You are flawed. Just live there. And so you do. And so I did.

I hate to think that I, a man of 30, am still bailing out that same water and therefor am still playing out the same drama as that scared child. How can that be? Surely sometime in the last ten years or so I’ve had the chance to right the ship? I don’t think that my personal trauma was all that much worse than what a lot of others, people who have done much better at navigating the sea off life than I have, went through.

Addiction is a real bitch. It mostly comes to those of us who are already living lives of stress and disappointment, who already feel out of control – the water bailers. We are needy people. We are tired. When relief offers itself to us, we’ll take that relief. No, we’ll take double. Scratch that. Just give us the whole case, please and thank you. If being drunk or high that makes us feel good then we will be drunk or high. If its comes along who possesses that magic touch that pierces our darkness we’ll declare them our emotional Jesus Christ (and we’ll crucify them too.) It can be religion. It can be video games. For most of us its a long list of things we indulge in to excess to get out of our terror filled heads for 10 minutes or so. And this is bad. This is a life out of control. But the things, the alcohol or the sex, aren’t really the problem at first. They’re just things. But then one day, these things come alive.

Pretty soon, if we drink every day, our brains will decide that they need to drink every day, need it like it’s fucking water. The thing that was designed to make us clamber out of our caves each morning and join the other hominids in hunting food and safety and sex is redirected and convinced that was it really needs is Jim Beam. How are we supposed to argue with the deep rooted guidance of our mammalian brains? Oh. With abstract reasoning, right? Surely the frontal cortex will be our salvation? Because we can see that its the liquor or the erotic chat rooms that are killing us we can stop, right? Did I happen to mention that this stoping has to be done on a particular Tuesday when we’re going to have to first go to work with a hangover, get shit on by the boss because we half assed yesterday’s paperwork, and then go home to a wife who rightly doesn’t trust us and has some acute remarks to make about our behavior of late (or worse to an empty apartment with nothing to focus on but our own addicted mind), all of this couched in an existence primarily marked by feelings of isolation and fear – fuck if we can remember why. No. I think I’ll go ahead and have that drink that my mind and body are crying out for. Logic and abstract reasoning can go fuck themselves. Truly.

And now, my friends, this traumatized person, this scared child desperately trying to bail water from his emotional boat while the water rises higher and higher with adulthood, is trapped in a new cycle, and has a new problem; he is an addict. Worse, the old feelings of inadequacy and helplessness are reinforced by the trauma of realizing (and he does realize, the frontal cortex is good for that much) he is an addict, and he can’t quit the addiction for the same reason he couldn’t stop punching those kids in the face and couldn’t do his homework. He has other problems. The water still must be bailed. Each problem reinforces the other. If he’d felt helpless before, well, now he just feels fucked.

We try to stop. And maybe we can stop – for a week or two, but on some particular tuesday we fail, just like we did when we were little kids trying to do our homework. We fail like we knew we would, like we always have and always will.

My addiction is sexual in nature. Can I tell you about it? I mean really tell you? Would you really care to know? So much of my life has been lived underground, in that dark place I don’t talk about and no one else can see. More than half of myself, hidden. I’m afraid to do this. Is it reckless to reveal the darkest secrets to the world? Someone has to, I suppose. To paraphrase Yoni Wolf, sometimes you have to scream something out or you’ll never tell nobody.

My addiction started when I was 15, so that’s 15 years ago now, half my life. Somehow I’ll figure out how to communicate the dark side of those fifteen years, but life, is lived on particular Tuesdays, so I think for now I’ll just tell you about a recent one.

A few weeks ago was Taylor Acoustics’s birthday. Taylor and I had been growing distant for years now, but the love was still there whenever we did happen to find ourselves together. We hadn’t lived in the same area for many years and I viewed the night of birthday celebration in the city as a chance to reignite the playful fire of our friendship and to start a new chapter, this one older, more grizzled, set in Downtown Detroit and with higher stakes. I had masturbated every day that week; it wasn’t out of control to the point where I wasn’t leaving my bedroom unless I was alone in the house or so that I couldn’t look people in their eyes, but it did mean that with a little alcohol in me I could become tired easily, or go hazy, or become depressed and in the worst case start spilling that depression in ways subtle or obvious. So I had called up Binge and procured 4 Adderall pills to ensure I would have the energy for a night of fun.

The day of the party I dropped Prophesy off at work, came home, and realized that I had six good hours before I needed to head over to Taylor’s. I think I held out for 10 minutes before my brain did the necessary math for the inevitable to occur. You see, one of the problems of the lifelong compulsive masturbator is that while the force of the compulsion only becomes a heavier freight train over time, the act its self holds less and less pleasure. Certain drugs and certain combinations of drugs can recruit novel parts of the brain to join in on the fun and generally make one feel like a teenager with his first high speed internet connection again. So when it occurred to me that I had the loving combination of amphetamine and marijuana readily at my disposal and six hours with nothing to do on my hands? Well – I didn’t really feel like I had any choice in the matter.

The pill was a slow release 20, a lot for a guy with no tolerance built up, and I felt the sweet buzz of energy almost as soon as I gulped the water down after the pill. Soon after that I picked out a good sized nug of cannabis, broke it up with my fingers, and loaded the entire thing into my bong. I took hit after hit, rapidly taking as much smoke into my lungs in as little time as possible.

The internet connection at the house is such that I have to hold my computer up to the window, pay a few dollars for a 24 hour subscription to a local wifi service, and in this manner download all of the content I need before sitting or laying down to enjoy. In my current state of drug enabled efficiently and creatively, I collected pictures and stories with a sense of urgency and adherence to method akin to that of a speed chess player. For the first few hours my masturbation was ecstasy. Every model on my screen was a living goddess and testament to the divine nature of feminine sexuality. My fantasies as always undulated between the twin extremes of ultimate power and total humiliation. I’d always wanted to either own or submit, a perpetual teenager both worshiping what he couldn’t have and wanting to control it. I was almost a god to my little psychic harem summoning submissive angels at will to fulfill my tiniest desires, and then at the next moment a slave, kissing the feet of a beautiful teenage queen with worthless lips while she casually scrolls her cell phone barely noticing me. Then I was the goddess herself and I imagined what life might have been with a different body, how powerful and beautiful and perfect I could have been, how I could have had slaves – slaves like me – and a life of erotic whimsy. Every so often when I felt the weed wearing off I would roll over and frantically grab my bong off the floor and take a hit before returning to my inclusive world of pleasure and shame. But as the hours rolled on, almost unnoticed, shame began to overrule pleasure, and logic threatened to intrude on my bliss.

You’re going to be a piece of shit for Taylor’s party.

I jerked off a little harder, even though my boner was becoming smaller in my hand and the pleasure less tangible.

They’re going to be able to smell the shame on you.

I scrolled through stories looking for a darker fantasy to pull my consciousness back down into the pleasure cave and away from the voice. I didn’t want to think of the other friends who would be there that night and how I would inevitably act like a ragged street dog around them – too aggressive and too needy all at once. I went back to the task at hand.

This is fucking sad.

Then my phone, a $20 flip phone I had bought specifically because of it’s lack of internet access, started buzzing. I grabbed it and looked at the screen. A text message from Innocence, wanting to talk. Sorry, Innocence, not today. A minute later it buzzed again. My mom calling. I hit silence. I went back to stoking myself. Each time it buzzed a little shock of fear struck my heart. Once the mind gives itself to the fantasy world, reality becomes the ghost. A minute or an hour later it buzzed again. Mom again.

I stood up and propped my Macbook against my window sill for more downloading. In order to do this I had to move one leg off the bed and sort of shimmy my foot on the floor until it had penetrated the layer of crap – books, dirty clothes, papers, odd objects of which I do not know the origin, that cover the space of my bedroom floor while kneeling with the other leg on the bed so as not to have to attempt to make room for that foot as well. I felt like a child and like a rat. During this operation I did not lose focus on the task at hand for a moment. I stood this way, gathering pictures and stories, these ones more extreme in their fetish content, for I don’t know how long; I only know that when the phone buzzed again my right leg was spasming in little bursts, my ankle on the floor had begun to ache from supporting my weight, as did my dick from being manhandled while at half mast. The phone kept buzzing, each pulse a screaming banshee of shame.

Your grandpa is dead or some such thing. She’s desperate to reach you. She knows her fuck up son isn’t picking up the phone because he’s busy being a fuck up. She’s disgusted. She’s scared. She hates you.

I turned the phone off and threw it on the floor.

Time stood still for my hand and my dick, but my fantasies got darker with the sky. I contemplated finding a bad mistress, a real sadist who would make my life hell. I don’t mean that I just fantasized about this; I mean that I considered actually doing it. I would find a woman like this somehow and give myself to her. I’d give her all of my money, my birth certificate, my social security card, my debit card. I’d help her to make a video of me in humiliating positions, and then I’d make a list of embarrassing people she could send it to me as blackmail if I ever misbehaved. I’d order a chastity device for myself and give her the key. I’d be her slave. That was what I deserved, to be a slave. With the adderall and weed still powering my brain I plunged into previously unexplored depths of specifics. I imagined myself seeking out bitchy women and then presenting this idea to them. I created a power point presentation in my mind which I would show them in order to convince them that having me as a slave would be beneficial to their lives. I even posted a craigslist ad with this premise. I wanted to feel insane. I was no longer masturbating about sex or women; I was jerking off to my own shame and I’d never felt more erotic.

Around seven the adderall started to wear off. I hadn’t come and my body ached from being held stiff. My dick hurt and was probably bleeding. None of this felt good anymore. I found my phone, and with great effort decided that I’d better call my mom back incase someone really was dead. No one was. She wanted to have dinner with me that night. I told her I couldn’t make it and my voice shook as I apologized a little too emphatically. But that was all it was.

I also had texts from Taylor Acoustic but I was in no condition to go out. Any plans had to be canceled. This night would be another trophy on the mantle of the addiction which had already stollen so much from my life. Anyway, this was no time for philosophical contemplation of my condition. I had work to do. I took another pill.

I jerked all through the night to more and more humiliating fantasies, trying to push the sense of erotic shame to its brink, but the magic was gone and now the models weren’t quite pretty enough or else didn’t fit with my fantasies. The stories I found were either poorly written or didn’t echo properly with my fetishes. My brain demanded some deeper depth of perversion to re-ignite the intensity but, drugs or no, my body simply wasn’t built to maintain sexual stimulation for this long. My dick was soft in my hand half the time though I never stopped pumping. I kept getting up to take another hit off the bong and download more pictures, but my leg was throbbed with pain when I stood on it and reality’s encroachments became sadder and harder to ignore. On and on this went. The shame felt like real shame and I wanted to push it away. My right hand kept stroking. My left hand kept clicking. Story, picture, story, this model, that one. The birds chirping outside my window mocked my pain. My body ached. Each stoke hurt my dick. Finally, around 11 in the morning 22 hours after I’d casually swallowed that first pill, I found my release.

So that’s what a specific tuesday can be like in the life of an addict. I’ve told you the details, but I don’t know how to communicate the horror of being trapped in a body that does these kinds of things, that seemingly can’t not do these kinds of things. In my best moments I love life, I love intimacy and connection and love. But then sometimes I go into a trance where I worship the idea of these ideas exact opposites. Such insane helplessness. And yet it always feels like its my fault. This is not something that happens to me, its something I do. Am I a freak? A pervert? There is a line of logic which says I should embrace these things, I mean, I’m not hurting anyone. I hear this line, but I can only say that whether I’m hurting anyone or not, I do not want to keep doing these things, from my innermost core I reject them. They are terror to me. They are hell. I do not want them. I will not embrace them.

I spent the next two days in bed. My nervous system was shocked to fuck so I couldn’t sleep. Most parts of my body hurt and I could hardly touch my dick even to pee. I laid there in the darkness contemplating my condition and laughing at my brain’s little fantasies of change. This would not be some rock bottom experience launching me into changed life. I masturbated again as soon as I could.