My Life Story and my Failures

Hello. I have had problems with pornography for nearly 8 years now. I used to be a frequent member of this community 4 years ago. But certain events in my life happened and I just gave up. This might not be so relevant to the topic of my addiction problem. But, right now I feel in such a low point in my life that I feel that I just need to share with anyone my story. I don’t feel comfortable sharing this issues with anyone of my family or friends directly. And… As I said, my story might not be so relevant to the topic of NoFap, but I just feel so lost right now that I am writing how did I end up here.


How it all began:

My story with addiction started when I was 13 years old. It all started with me doing homework in the computer feeling the sudden curiosity and attraction to women that many teenager boys feel. It all started with regular movie clips watching just pretty girls in youtube and stuff like that. Then, one day by accident I found my first porn website. That day I was so drawn to the content that I thought I had hit the jackpot. Little did I know, I had found the beginning of my addiction. When I was 13, I absolutely hated school. I just felt so bored out of my mind and hated many of the lessons they taught. Civics, math, Spanish, religion. It all felt like such a drag. I remember that all I wanted to do was to draw in my iPad and learn how to become a better drawer. However, during those years I started to go deeper and deeper into pornography. By that time, I used to watch it every day 3 times a day. The situation got so bad that I even started to take screenshots of those videos with my iPad and keep the pictures in my iPad to observe every single detail about those scenes. One day, the school decided to make an iPad inspection and I forgot to delete the screenshots of the porn websites. I got into so much trouble that I was nearly kicked out of school when they found porn in my iPad. This crushed me and made me feel utterly humiliated. At home I got into so much trouble because I already had not so great grades, and now my parents found out I nearly got kicked out of school. My dad was so angry at me that the only thing I got from that day was to shut up and focus on school. Since that day, I stopped drawing and I started to focus more and more in the school topics I absolutely hated. I felt so bad during those years that I had many suicidal thoughts during 2 years. During those 2 years, I continuously thought about ways to kill myself, I hated every day studying for the useless crap of school, I continued to watch porn every day, and I never made a single drawing ever again in my iPad.


High school… Those good memories:

Then, when I turned 15, I went to high school. All my life I have always been an introvert with very low social skills and with very few friends. So, starting high school was something very challenging. However, things started to really change for the better after 6 months in high school. During that time, I came across a completely different environment that was nothing like my previous school. In high school, I met teachers that were really interested in helping me learn and find out what were the things I really enjoyed in life. And, while high school was very stressful at times, unlike middle school, in high school I became a really good student that pushed himself to learn as much as possible. Not only that. During high school I had a life changing thought. I thought to myself: “What if I could improve myself because I really want to be better?” For the first time in my life I thought about the possibility of doing things only because I wanted to improve myself. I wanted to learn how to learn better, to speed read, to memorize better, learn martial arts, meditation, to become an athlete. In the first time in my life, my imagination was the only limitation of what I could be. And the second most important thing that happened to me during those years, was that I met an incredible girl named Andrea. The first time I met her, I was a shy antisocial mess that still struggled to talk to people. And I met her during an activity in French class in which we had to make couples and practice some phrases. I was extremely shy and awkward, but during the first seconds that we talked, I realized that she was completely different from any person I had ever met. She had a warm smile that made me feel like if I wasn’t such an awkward weirdo. She made me feel normal. She made me forget for a moment about how shy and awkward I felt around others. After that activity had finished, the only thought I had in my head was: “I wish I could talk to her again.” And by some miracle, that did happen. We were classmates on the same French class, and we started to talk more and more during class until eventually we became really close friends. The one thing that I hadn’t realized yet was that I was in love with her. So, during my first year a part of me felt like I was in heaven. I was happy for the first time in many years I had more friends now, I had created friendship bonds with my teachers, I became a great student with good grades, and I had a goal in life. To become more than what I was back then. To improve myself and become a great man. However, although I was happy, I still had my issues with porn during those years. When I turned 16, I started to realize more and more that pornography was screwing with my mind in more ways that I had never realized. So I started to do research, and that’s how I came across this community. I learned about NoFap and I added it to my list of goals of self-improvement. To be honest, even though I was happy during high school, dealing with my addiction became really hard. I was 16, my sexual urges were becoming more unstable, and I didn’t have a lot of information or guidance about how to deal with it or about sex. But still, I tried NoFap. During that time, I remember that I absolutely tried with everything I had not to relapse to pornography. And during those years, I saw some of the best progress that I ever had. I manage to resist the urges for weeks. My best record was of 2 months without porn. I did have my relapses, but every time I did, I tried again and again and again. When I turned 17, things started to change. It was my last year of high school and we all had to seriously start thinking about our options of college. During that time, I wanted to study chemistry because it was one of my favorite subjects in high school. And then I decided that I would study bio technology. During the last 6 months of high school the happiness that I had felt for years would have a massive turning point. During that time, Andrea and I had become way closer friends that we had ever been. We trusted each other with our concerns, worries and fears about the future. And the more time I spent with her, the more I realized that I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life. I never understood this feeling that I felt before, but now I knew that I loved her. I loved with all of my heart and I wanted to be there for her. And a small part of me thought that maybe she would love me the same way I loved her because of how close we had become.



The end of all happiness in my world:

It all changed however, during one time she told me that she had met a guy in a nightclub, they kissed and a few days later she went to his house at night and they had sex. I am not sure of why, but when she told me that she had sex with this guy she had just met… I was… I had felt something. Something I had never felt in my entire life. The joy that I had felt during those wonderful 3 years of high school was cut short. Then I felt it. Pain. I felt a pain in my heart so much worse than anything I had ever felt during middle school or any time of my life. I am not sure why. We were just friends, but… I still loved her. And when she told me that, I had felt a pain in my heart so bad that it started to literally hurt me. I had this odd feeling like if something was crushing my rib cage, my heart beat was going out of control, and my throat was being crushed from the inside. In that time, I had realized something. The part of me that thought that maybe she loved me the same way I loved her was crushed. But even after that pain that went to my heart, I still cared deeply about her. But, another stab to the heart came to me when she told me that she would go to college in another state of the country. The summer after we finished high school was an odd sensation. The previous summers that I had in high school were a sweet time that I had for myself to relax and be cool. But that summer, Andrea left to move out to the new city where she would go to college. During those 2 months of summer, I spent them in a state of shock because I couldn’t digest the things that I was feeling. The girl that I loved for 3 years that brought so much joy to my life didn’t feel the same thing for me and now she was gone from my life. I tried to heal and move on with life, focus on college and get ready for what was to come. However, even though my high school was a sweet time that I had to meet people, be happy and have a dream, my time was up. I was confident because I knew change was a part of life. And I thought: when I changed from middle school to high school, things changed for the better. MAYBE, the same will happen now that I will start on college. Oh boy, I couldn’t have been more wrong…


College depression:

When I turned 18, I entered university and I was going to start my classes to become an engineer in biotechnology. I was still struggling with coping with the feelings that I had now that Andrea was away. But I still managed to try to keep up my hopes of a better future in college. So my first semester was marked by a series of massive failures. In my first month I had a rough start. I had performed not so great in subjects such as physics and microbiology. But I was still hanging on. It was troubling, but I still tried to keep pushing myself. By that time, I realized that college was more disappointing than I had hoped. The teachers weren’t as good as the ones I had in high school. Many of them were mediocre and other were completely useless as teachers. Still, I tried. During my second month of the semester, I was crushed by many things all coming to hit me in the face at the same time. I failed yet again, maybe even worse, in many subjects. I failed microbiology, math and physics even worse than I had ever failed a subject ever since middle school. This made me lose a lot of confidence in myself. Then, there was Andrea. I was feeling really down during my semester, so I tried to call her every weekend to check on her. I even went was far as doing my homework in a quick, clumsy way just to get it done and have time to call her on the afternoon of every Saturday. But almost all the times I tried, she never picked up my calls. And then I started to develop some back problems. Since I was so busy at school, I spent too much time sitting down with not so great posture. To add on to that, I started to gain weight because I wasn’t working out as much as I used to do because of the time I spent studying. And the final nail in the coffin was that I had to walk a lot in college from one building to another every class with a very heavy backpack. I needed to carry my laptop, iPad, books, notebooks, water bottle, lunchbox and food. All of this started to make develop some problems in the right side of my back. It got so bad to the point that I started to feel pain even when I was standing up or walking without my backpack. During my third month of the first semester, I started to feel worse than I had ever felt in my entire life. I felt useless because of how bad my grades were. I felt that I had no future, no use, like if I was a waste of space. And the fact that my parents were once again criticizing my poor performance at school really didn’t help. So, I turned to some really harmful behaviors. I isolated myself from everyone. I stopped talking to almost all of my friends. I spent most of my days in the university trying to study to fix my grades and feeling depressed. All the time I spent in the university was also an excuse to stay away from home and not have to deal with the disappointment of my parents. My addiction to pornography went back to the same as it had always been. I forgot about nofap and about attempting to control myself. But I used porn to try to ease my emotional pain and escape the suffering. And finally, I started to hurt myself. I would grab a knife and cut my arm, heat a screwdriver and give me burns in the arm, grab a metal pipe and angrily beat myself with it in the head, punch walls, and finally, I started to have some disorders in the way I ate and slept. I wanted to stop existing. I felt like I was useless at school, the girl I loved was gone, I was away from my friends and family because I was a failure. I lived only for school. Every night I went to sleep I cried wishing not to wake up the next day. And finally, by the end of that semester I wanted to kill myself. And I never went on with it. But I really wanted to die. And I started to research a way to kill myself and to write letters saying goodbye to friends and family. By far, this was the lowest point in all of my life. But I never followed through with my plans to kill myself. By the end of the semester, I barely managed to pass all of my subjects except for microbiology and math. And finally, the damned semester was over once and for all. My first semester of career nearly destroyed me.


New hope and more pain:

After that, we had Christmas holidays. And finally I had some time for myself. One of the things that I loved the most during my free time in high school was going for a run. There was always something very beautiful about running for me. It made me feel free and get a great feeling of accomplishment every time I ran. Running was one of my favorite activities in the world. But, during that holiday… When I tried to run again… I realized I couldn’t. Or at least not in the way I used to. I realized that the damage that my back suffered from carrying my heavy backpack was more than I had expected. Now I not only felt pain when I walked around with my backpack, now I felt pain even with my own bodyweight. My posture had been affected so badly that I struggled to properly walk without feeling my right leg weird. And tried again to run, and even though I could run, I couldn’t run again without the constant feeling of pain in my lower back every time I spent an entire minute running without stopping. That winter my life had changed when I read a book about a Navy Seal named David Goggins. I read his life story and it was truly an inspiring story to me to see how a man could be broken and with the odds of the world against him and still fight to become a total badass like him. His book had changed my life, and after I read his book I swore that I wouldn’t kill myself and I would stop with self-harm. Things however didn’t play out the way I wished. The next semester, it was more of the same story as the first semester. More failure at school, more isolation, more pain. During that semester I tried my hardest to be like Goggins and stay strong. But I was too broken to do that. I got my ass kicked by all the subjects at school, I was also still coping with the absence of the girl I loved, and I still felt that my family didn’t care about me and instead that they cared only about good grades. And as you can imagine, my porn addiction didn’t stop. By this time, things were so bad that porn didn’t look like an addiction anymore, it looked like just another bad habit. I tried many times to be disciplined and carry on but no matter what I did, I always felt pain that crushed my spirits. Heck, I was so screwed that many times I had to get out of the classroom just to walk around the campus trying to find some sense of inner peace while I played old audio messages from Andrea to make me feel that there was still a reason to carry on. For some reason, I found it torturous to keep my ass stick to a chair hearing a teacher talk stuff about chemistry, physics or math. And there were a lot of bad teachers during that time, so that didn’t help at all. Months went on and the time of my final exams arrived. I got the living crap beat out of me during those exams. I think that I had never been so destroyed in several exams in my life. It was during one microbiology exam that I finally thought: “Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this anymore. Maybe I picked the wrong career.” And dang, it was terrible. I remember that I didn’t even want to pass the damn subjects anymore. All I wanted was for this horrible semester to be over. My dream was to have some time to heal the wounds that I got from the semester. I wanted to have the free time of summer to deal with the stuff that I got in my mind. My peace of mind was shaken when I got the results of my final exams. They weren’t good. I failed physics, math, mass balance and organic chemistry. And I received an email saying that if I wanted to stay in the university with the biotechnology career, I had to retake some of those subjects that summer. That was the final nail in the coffin. I needed time to heal my wounds. So I decided to quit studying biotechnology.


Fresh start:

So, after the end of that torture, I started to plan out my future. I wanted to pick another career that suited me better. And believe it or not, I spoke to my parents about it. Their attitude really changed after that year of college. Yes, they were aware that my grades sucked. But after all that time, they didn’t like to see me in the sorry state I was. I spent all days and even weekends in campus trying to study with little success, I didn’t make any time to interact with my friends and I barely even spoke to my family anymore. That’s when they realized that this was hurting me and they chose to support me to pick up a new option. And my mom asked me a big question that left me thinking: “Do I want to stay here?” That got me thinking. I had spent 1 year walking around the campus with a hurt back trying to think about my life and my present. All I could feel during those walks was pain. Pain of living in that sorry state that was a shadow of the man I used to be in high school. Pain of missing so dearly the girl I still loved. Pain of walking around with a hurt back and not being able to enjoy my runs anymore. It was all pain. So I decided, it’s time to abandon the mission here. And that’s how I decided to go into another college to pick another career.



The life of an engineer:

After I left my first college and I quit biotechnology, I tried to spend my summer in a quiet and peaceful way trying to heal my wounds from college. Even though I tried to get back into the old things I enjoyed at high school, I soon realized I couldn’t really do it. My body felt heavy and broken. I gained 15 kg during that year and my back was still on a lot of pain. Despite all of my attempts to lose weight and to perform corrective exercises, I was still very hurt after that year. I could walk, but I couldn’t run the same way I used to do a year ago. And my mental state was still a mess. I was dealing with all the traumas of when I had left from college and the mental struggles I had with missing the girl I loved. I knew that I needed urgent psychological help, but for some reason I never sought help. I thought that my wounds only needed time. And I was right, at the beginning. But maybe not as right as I thought I was. After summer ended, I began my classes at the new college to study mechatronics engineering. And by that time I turned 19. I was terrified of that new start because I felt that I had to proof to myself that I wasn’t the big disaster I thought I was in the year of biotechnology. And miraculously, I didn’t start nearly as bad. I was actually performing really well. Not only that, I managed to make some friends and to get more free time to do my own activities. Oddly enough, I also began to make more research about my back pain and it was a slow process that has taken me years of investigate, but in time I managed to understand what parts of my back were hurt and how to heal them through corrective exercises. It wasn’t all easy and there were still a few not so great teachers. But, the environment was very different. And oddly enough, I started to feel once again the need to push myself and improve. For the first time in months, I was starting to feel more alive again. It wasn’t perfect, I still had to deal with many things, but it was something to begin with. And well, it made me believe that I could still have a bright future again. I mean, with a fresh start like this, what could go wrong?


Enter… Covid 19:

After successfully finishing the first 6 months in the new college as a mechatronics engineer, I started to realize more and more how good teachers were actually pretty rare to find. Since, I started to realize how some of my teachers sucked at teaching, or at keeping the studying interesting. But for a while, I actually saw this as a challenge to myself to study harder and surpass my teachers and in the way of teaching my friends that we hadn’t learned in class. It was challenging, but I knew it was possible. However, it all changed drastically during the rise of covid 19, restrictions, and the need of online school. This new way of teaching had many flaws that restricted learning and a few advantages for the lazy ones. But honestly, not much happened during that time. At least when compared to other years. Online school was flawed in many ways, but I still tried to push myself to learn more and more as much as I could to pass all my subjects. And then I finished my first year as a mechatronic student. Then I turned 20, and things started to change for the worse. Online school wasn’t killing my spirits, but we did start to come across worse teachers and more mediocre lessons. Classes were boring, annoying homework nobody knew how to do, and exams that were not related at all with the contents seen in class. Nobody was on the brink of failing the courses, but the morale was starting to die out. By that time our priority stopped being to learn more of mechatronics and surpass ourselves. The priority started to become to pass the subjects by any means necessary. And with online school, figuring out easier ways to pass the exams became an easier task. I really hope that I was one the last students to lose hope on learning in class, but even I lost my faith on teachers and on the school program. To be honest, I kind of hated some of the teachers for being a bunch of useless idiots. And after completing my second year as a mechatronic student, I turned 21. The third year of school has also been remarkably boring. If in the middle of the second year I started to lose my faith, by the end of the year my hope was so dry. And to be honest, during the first half of the third year I felt a loss of hope at what I was learning at school. Part of me still thinks that mechatronics is what I should be studying, but I feel that the way this has been handled by teachers has been a bit poor. I have still tried to keep my faith on myself to improve myself even if I don’t trust school anymore. But I haven’t gotten much done in that area either.


Where am I now?

Right now, I am still 21 years old. And I am almost at the end of my third year of mechatronics and very close to finish my education in the university as a student of mechatronics. But to be honest, I’m not even sure of how much have I really learned during these 3 years. I enjoyed my first year and a half to a degree. But the other half has been pretty boring. And I am not doing great right now. The more time has passed, the emptier I have felt. I am sitting in this chair being clueless about what to do with my future. Specially after one last thing has happened that pushed me to write this down…

Two weeks ago I had a small reunion with my classmates from high school. Among them, Andrea, the girl I loved since high school. I won’t lie, seeing her again was something that scared the hell out of me. During my depression, she became the face of my trauma. After she left 4 years ago, I couldn’t move on from the idea that she had left because she was the first person that I had truly loved so far in all my life. Because of that, I wasn’t even sure if I would even see her again. And that idea actually gave me nightmares at nights during those 4 years in which she was gone. Also I was terrified to see her and let her see what a waste of a person I had become throughout the years. Anyway, I went to this reunion and there she was… She had changed a bit here and there, but she still had the very same essence. She was still that smiling girl who wanted to have fun with her friends. She was for the most part, still the same person. And then the moment that I had dread for years came. She said hi to me and she hugged me. Years ago, a hug from her meant the world to me. A hug from her was the biggest treasure I could have in the entire world. And during my depression when I studied biotechnology, all I ever wanted during that hell was one hug from her to heal my wounds. The idea of hearing her voice one more time in the future kept me going during that hellish year. BUT now… Now it had been 4 years of many changes… And the thing I felt… Nothing… That’s how I realized. I love for her is still there but… The purest form of love that I had felt for her all those years ago was now truly gone. And that realization made me feel… A cold empty feeling in my chest that made me feel terrible. I felt more isolated and lonely, even when I was surrounded by my friends from high school. Cold emptiness in my heart. Those years had been of a form of gain and loss. But that day I had felt that one of the things that still gave a sense of something to my heart had finally died out too. For some reason, that made me feel depressed again. And… I don’t know what to do anymore… I know this awfully long story that’s not entirely related to NoFap and it’s probably not what some of you might expect. Heck, this might be me just being too dramatic for things that just happen in life but… This sensation that I feel is killing me in the inside. I don’t know why, but this emptiness has made feel pain again. And I hadn’t felt pain like this ever since I was a student in biotechnology. For some reason, I feel like if in recent months, the pain I thought that I had buried away 3 years ago after I left biotechnology has come back to haunt me in my empty feelings. Yesterday I had some form of breakdown that I hadn’t felt in years. I felt alone and worthless, without hope. It started to hurt me in the inside. And then the emotional pain that I was receiving was too much for me. I started to have once again self-harm thoughts. A small part of me wanted me to hurt myself again with one of my knives to try and make the emotional pain go away. I nearly went down that path again. After a while, my thoughts had gotten so bad that I couldn’t find any other way to stop other than beating my own head with my own fists. Yes, I know it sounds weird and childish. But at that time I was having a breakdown that I hadn’t felt in 3 years. And to be honest, I also fear that one small part of me is having some suicidal thoughts again. And I am not even sure why… That scares me a lot because I don’t want to go back into that dark path… That year of depression had a high cost that left me some physical and emotional injuries that even today haven’t fully healed. And I don’t want to fall down that path again that wasted my life. At least I’d like to think that I don’t. I feel lost and I don’t know what to do with life anymore. And welp, during these last 4 years, my pornography viewing never stopped. And that’s why I write in this forum. Part of me wants to try again to take this path to see if it helps me heal anything of my broken motivation. I seek a way to break free of this cycle and be able to learn how to move on with my life.