First post ever on NoFap

Hello Guys,

My name is John. I've known about NoFap for a year or two, but have kept it locked away in the back of my mind until today.

I'm in my 50's, so I've had a large number of years to be systematically damaged, a barely noticeable little piece at a time each time, by porn. Some of the earliest life memories I have involve porn. Being a latch-key kid in the early 70's, left alone for hours at a time even as a very young child, and filling the time by rooting through dad's box of magazines ... the ones waaay in the back of the closet.

That, right through to the present day of highly customized, easily accessible, visually dazzling, potently addictive pornography. By now, it has to have been tens of millions of individual images and clips I've consumed in my lifetime.

I was in my 30's when I first learned that "recovery" was a thing. I had become a Christian around age 20, but the Christian community is not famous for having any systematic or pragmatic programs for recovery. So it was ten years of trying really hard and mostly failing.

In my 30's, I discovered twelve-step sex addiction groups, which had a strong presence in the town I was living in at the time. I was able to go to meetings three or four times a week. That helped me get to a whopping hundred day stretch of porn/masturbation abstinence. But shortly after that, I moved ... and the town I'm in now doesn't have frequent meetings.

In the meantime, I got married - which cut way down on the masturbation, but hasn't eliminated it. And of course, internet porn just gets more and more varied and compelling each year. So it's been twenty years of two months clean, one month backslidden, two months clean, one month backslidden, and so on.

I can honestly say though, the template and the deep resonance of those 100 days I experienced twenty years ago - all the meetings and the one Patrick Carnes recovery book I read - all of that still stays with me - and the standard and memories of success are still as fresh with me today as they were when I was still enjoying that hundred day run.

But I never did reproduce that hundred day run. I've had thirties and forties and what-not ... but never had a hundred straight days of abstinence since those meetings twenty years ago.

So now, for the first time in my marriage of many years, my wife is away on business for a whopping three weeks! It didn't take me about three or four days to go completely nuts and act out on a level I haven't seen in years.

So, here I am ... fresh account on NoFap, reading other people's posts, wondering if I could still come back and recover my "cleanness", for want of a better word. That's how I've referred to living without porn and masturbation for all these years: keeping it CLEAN.

I don't know why I'm inclined to mention this, but it's not guilt that's bringing me here. I do feel some guilt, but not enough to take action. The problem - and it's a biggie - is the TIME that's been lost. Between the porn and acting out yesterday, I lost about fourteen straight hours. That was just one day! On a good day, I might lose only three or four. Rarely less than that.

Imagine decades of that.

That, repeated over and over again for years and years, has brought me to my fifties, broke, dependent on my wife's income, and socially awkward and pessimistic enough to not even bother looking for a new job anymore. I don't even look for productive hobbies or chores anymore. It's just TV, eating, the occasional walk, surfing the net (usual stuff as well as porn), and spending time with my wife.

Half-written books, painting supplies, musical instruments, wholesome collections of various kinds ... they litter my life in large plastic tubs in the garage instead of front and center where they could bless and energize me and the few people left around me.

So if I had a dream about what a life without porn would be like ... it be to have the mind of a wholesome and optimistic 16 year old. To think that I could still do anything I wanted to with my life. That everything had a meaning and value if I applied myself to it. That every problem (big or small) was just a passing blip in the line and meant nothing long-term. That life, especially tomorrow, was really really cool.

I don't know how porn has affected your life, but in my case, (again, having so many decades of porn addiction), it's made everything largely meaningless by comparison. Even really cool stuff, like big-name rock concerts, the wife getting a huge raise, buying a new house ... the soul just isn't willing to get excited anymore.

So I'm here as a fresh effort to regain simple normal thinking again. The kind of thinking that, for me, requires the complete absence of porn and masturbation to work.

The kind of thinking that, a barely noticeable little piece at a time each time, ultimately yields great decisions, strong actions, and an admirable life.

-John

ps. I'd start a NoFap journal with the whole "day-one" thing, but I'm still only 95% of the way to making that decision.

I recently deleted about five TeraBytes of porn-data from my drives (yeah, plural drives ... had it all backed up to a second 5TB drive). You can imagine how traumatic deleting 5TB of stash was. But I've still got about 30 individual clips or so that remain the decisive stuff. The stuff I still can't let go of.

I know the drill. Every last image, clip, and bookmark has to go, even the stuff that's "not technically porn" - but which an honest man can't lie to himself about. Until that last image or video is gone, a guy is just fooling himself, like the severe alcoholic who is "trying to cut down". It's just a matter of time, a ticking bomb.

Once those last thirty or so clips come off the drive ... and God only knows how that's going to happen ... then I can post my first day one.

If you got this far, thank you for reading my story.

 

Thank you, FriendlyCanadian and JohnICT. I'll remember both of you as the first two guys who took an interest in my recovery.

I hope we're all still here a year from now, showing off our triple digit success numbers.

But for now ... 24 hours. That's all I'm shooting for and all I'm focused on.

 

Thanks for the encouragement, Protagoras.
I see 60 Days on your tracker, as of today. Congratulations to YOU! I aspire to your success and ability.
.
.
.
Well, I don't know where I got off saying earlier that I had 30 clips left in my collection after deleting 5TB. I inched toward deleting them last night and saw what I still actually had. Like most guys, (I'm guessing), I had my stash carefully sorted by themes and personalities - each in a sub-folder. At one time there were dozens and dozens of folders, some of them with hundreds of GBs per folder.

I had four folders left as of last night. When I opened them, they had a heck of a lot more than 30 total videos in them. I guess in all four, there probably 200-300 clips.

I watched about two or three seconds of several clips (maybe five of them), just so I was certain what I was letting go of here. Sheesh, even those two seconds were potent! Not enough to get me turned on, but enough to raise the brow and eyelids and pause all thought. Stage one of the death spiral ... and it only took a second or two. This was, after all, my boiled down stuff. The last survivors after the 5TB purge. The roaches.

But, that said, I had clarity last night. Regardless of how potent, this was, by definition, porn. And the reason I'm here on NoFap is as a resource for getting rid of porn.

So of the four folders, I deleted three of them. Ouch!

The fourth one I'm not sure of yet. I can't say if it needs to be deleted or not. It's not porn ... it's glamour videography with no nudity. And the main reason I've kept it around is because, being an amateur videographer, I've imagined making some glamour vids of my wife and these videos are handy for seeing how it's done. I've never used these videos as porn.

If I had never put this folder in with my porn, there would be no issue of conscience right now. I just made the mistake of putting these relatively innocent vids in with the venomous stuff as just one more folder a long while ago. I don't know if I'm lying to myself or not, but for today, I'm saying that this isn't porn ... it's safe to keep on my drive ... and it has nothing to do with the other stuff.

Needless to say, if these glamor videos cause a stumble (ie masturbation or drawing me into chain-viewing porn videos online), I'll confess it, reset whatever counter I'm using - and then immediately delete them.

So if all that is true, it means that I deleted all of my last porn last night. The last of 5TB is now gone and, to the best of my knowledge, there is not a single piece of porn nor any bookmarks on my computer or external drives.


Oddest thing. I've been getting up at 12:30pm every day lately. This morning I got up at 9:30am. I was even dead-sleepy, but still just felt inclined to drag my ass out of bed and get on with a day.

No telling if there's a connection, but that's what happened this morning.



So I'll need to look at the rest of the forum to see where I'm supposed to post now and how to get a counter set up.

If I go to a different section of the forum, this will be my last post in this thread. (Although I will read all replies.)

Thank you again, guys, for the initial welcome and encouragement.

 

A minor question about the PMO-counter ... if anyone is willing to help me understand.

I installed the PMO-counter in my signature. I understand it's mostly automatic - increases the number each day until I reset if I were to have a relapse. But how long does it keep counting if someone doesn't check in? If someone has a relapse and is so discouraged they leave the forum - and then don't log in again until, say, two years later ... would the counter show 700 days of success? Do other people who read their old posts see a PMO-counter that is still indicating daily success, even though that person relapsed and hasn't reset their counter?

Or does it stop counting at a certain point if a user doesn't log in?

.John

 

I'm now journaling at this URL. I'm looking forward to reading your replies.

https://www.nofap.com/forum/index.p...-clean-journaling-a-life-without-porn.136128/

 

.

.
.
Thanks for the kind words, @Born_For_War. I can honestly say that collecting that much porn was a colossal waste of time and money. All the thrill was imagined, like building castles in the air. Heck, 98% of those clips weren't ever even watched from beginning to end!

Such a stupid waste of time ... but that's in the past now, as long as I can keep my eyes on the prize every single day.

I read a few posts on your journal and saw where you've already had some long success stretches in the past ... so I wish you great success in your goals for 2018.
.
.
.

 

.
.
So far, I've completely immersed myself in the vision of 100 days porn and masturbation free. I'm on day 70 today. I'm choosing to focus on almost nothing else so that my thoughts keep coming back to reconciling the nature of the day today ... with the vision of completing day 100. I spend my days watching the ball ping-pong back and forth between those two extremes ... the court getting shorter and shorter with every day. Soon, day 100 and today will be one in the same.

I write about my motivations in my journal. Mostly for the purpose of being free of guilt feelings ... and to bless my marriage and make it function better.

Twenty years of recovery work and a number of very long success stretches, one possibly over two years long - don't really know as I usually stop counting days after a few months. (This was before I signed onto NoFap and started using the counter.)

If you arrived at 160+ days at one point, you and I will have much in common. It's definitely an interesting view from the top of six months.

Perhaps I'll see you at my journal. URL in the signature below.

First page of posts is the usual self-introduction and "here's what happened today". The second page already moves over into the philosophy and practical nature of sobriety and recovery, which is what I focus on now. My journal is less about me and more about the nature of recovery. I aspire to write (mostly) only posts that are helpful and inspiring.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.

 

Well said, @a.siah.

I wish you great success in your journey. I know it took a lot to get to this point where you are right now. Keep up the fine work. You're already on a much better path then a lot of other young men your age.
.
.
.