New account, same struggle. A fresh start

Hello again. (graphic+long)

I thought I conquered the beast by March (with the help of this community), and then the quarantine happened. I lost about three months of progress and staying on track, and I’ve not been able to keep a streak since. My first encounter with porn was at 8 years old, and this year marks the grim 8th anniversary since that first encounter (Half of my life...). I’ve been an addict since the beginning, and my tastes and fetishes only got worse and worse. There’s no need to get into the details, but it’s not good, just the most extreme and degrading femdom stuff you can imagine, and really by the time the time I was 13-14 it was at its apex. And the thing was, you wouldn’t even able to tell by looking or interacting with me. I present a shy, almost asexual, public image, so this is a deeply kept secret. I first heard of NoFap at 14, and I thought, “what bullshit”, but I then realized I didn’t exactly have a normal habit. But I still didn’t make the change. I couldn’t.

What made me reevaluate was that despite all my fetishes, until I was 14, I could at least consider myself straight. I started getting aroused by guys in porn. This sent me down a spin, as I was being changed by porn in a drastic and more obvious way. I pretended not to care, as whatever I still liked mostly straight stuff, even if highly fetishistic. But it changed dramatically. I soon found my attraction to guys growing, but it wasn’t natural at all, it came at me like a fetish’s. I had no interest in guys irl or romantically, and I only liked one very specific type of guy. And here’s where it gets really bad. I was only attracted to guys my age (I actually never watched gay porn). So what I would do is use discord and omegle to find guys my age to get pics from...this became one of my go too ways of getting off even despite how illegal it all clearly was. By the time I was fifteen, it was just awful. It affected my way of thinking and caused deep shame. But I was addicted. Once I did it a few times and got away with it, it was just so easy. But it caused me a mental dysphoria of sorts, and it lines up well with the symptoms of r/HOCD because of how compulsive it is. I wanted nothing to do with it, but I couldn’t stop my self. And soon my other fetishes started to fade away, in fact my tastes in straight porn even became vanilla, and I didn’t like femdom on anymore. I was changing and changing bad.

It was then I decided to read deeply into nofap. And I self-evaluated. I realized the deep shame I got from watching the extreme porn I did and doing the things I did affected me socially. I realized that pmo made me objectify people. I realized I could probably never have a normal relationship like this. I realized pmo gave me intrusive thoughts, trained me for instant gratification, and killed concentration. And of course, porn was seemingly making me want and do things I did not wish to desire or do, especially the illegal stuff.

September thru early December 2019 was rocky, with short streaks. But in December started the streak that I would carry to March 2020. And you know what, I thought I was cured. My attraction was back to normal, my thoughts more focused, I was more alert, even more sociable, without the burden of shame. I stopped coming back here mid-February. But then COVID hit. I was stuck at home. And with all the time I grew restless, and I was back to the old ways. At first, it seemed almost normal. I was pmo-ing to ‘regular’ porn, no fetishes, no extremes, just the popular stuff you’d see on the big sites or Reddit. But it quickly escalated, and I was back to the more extreme stuff. Yet still I wasn’t the doing the worse yet, discord and Omegle, because I didn’t even feel attracted to guys. That only took a month to ‘correct’ however, and I was back at my worse habits. I tried to fix my streaks, but I just couldn’t. And I’ve been faltering bad. So what changed now that made me come back here? Well, you see I’ve been able to at least avoid sending pictures this time around. Like I’ve been just seeing pictures, which is still illegal, but at the very least I’ve just not sent anything. But it has changed. Just an hour ago I sent a photo. I knew I shouldn’t but I did anyways, because I’m an addict looking for a fix, and worse the guy accidentally saw my face. Thankfully it was dark with poor camera quality, and not using my real name, but like that scares me. That was a wake-up call when I was done, one of many I had leading up to it, but that was the ultimate. I was grossed out, I genuinely hated myself then, and still now. I’m at my lowest low. I thought I hit rock bottom earlier, but now I’m there.

And school starts again Thursday. I need to fix myself, get back on the magic that gave me that three month streak, and further, do even better, so that staying home for a long wouldn’t be able to ruin it. And doing nofap isn’t the only thing I need to do, I need a general life improvement. I can’t keep doing this shit anymore. This is literally criminal, and rotting me from the inside. I’m familiar with this movement and what it advises, so I’m glad to be here to hold myself accountable. It hurts to write this all out because sometimes I just want to deny deny deny, but I can’t. Thank you all.