Hello, I'm VyMe and I'm 16yrs old. I had never thought or tried to masturbate or watch pornography up until the age of 15. It was almost as if this activity was advertised everywhere around me, i see this in movies and boys my age talk about how pleasurable it is. I decided to try it. Ever since then, this activity has taken control of my life. Whenever i was alone, bored or stressed, this is what i would turn to. Sometimes when i would get lots of homework, i would just choose to not do any of it and watch pornography instead... this ofcourse lead to bad grades... But grades weren't what i was really worried about, I had started changing, being distant towards my closest friends and i had trouble with having conversations, it's not that i didn't want to talk, i just could never think of anything, my mind would just go blank. My friends would ask me what happened to me, but at that time i didn't even know the answer. When i started behaving this way, i noticed that I masturbate and watch porn very often and thought that it's almost like an addiction, but at that time i did not know that it was possible to be addicted to pornography, so i looked it up. I discovered that pornography addiction was indeed a thing, but was not too worried about it, i told myself that i would stay away from it for at least 1 week... 2 days later I thought to myself "this is rediculous, I can stop whenever i want" and went back to doing it. After that I noticed that i just proved to myself that i could not stay away from it and that i was in fact addicted. A couple weeks ago i got really upset when i saw my friends give up on me, they didn't know why i changed, but they didn't even care anymore, they thought i just didn't like them. I had nobody. I told myself that i have had enough and at this moment, it has been 17 days since i last watched pornography. At times it gets hard, i start wanting it very much, but when the moment passes, it seems like it's just too easy and the more time goes by, the less those moments of missing pornography and masturbation occur.
Wow!! Good for you. I am thirteen years older than you and still your words are helping me. I have five days right now. I hope both of us stick with it and are happy. That sucks about what happened with your friends, but I can tell from reading this that you are smart and have a lot of integrity and honesty. I trust you will have many true and good friends in the future. Take care of yourself!
I also had a lot of similar symptoms. Porn definitely can numb you to the outside world and make it difficult to be engaged. More times that I can even count have I been in objectively wonderful situations and been at best detached and at worst miserable. I believe, after doing some research, that porn is the culprit.
