Trying Again - My story

Just had a couple of relapses after a streak of 8 days. To some, this might not seem like a lot, but for me it's actually quite an achievement. For the last year or so, I haven't been able to stay clean longer than a few days.
I'm not new to NoFap. But I have never really posted anything. I was more a sort of passive observer. But now I want to get serious in my recovery and for that, one has to be active.

The first time I discovered pornography was on a VHS tape. I was 8 years old and someone in my family recorded a TV programme but forgot to turn the recorder off. This way, some late night programming was also recorded. My older sister and I were watching, and soon we discovered an explicit soft core porn show. I can remember women in thongs and small bikinis pole dancing, lapdancing and stripping. Off course I knew how the female body looks like, but seeing those almost naked female bodies dancing in this sexual and alluring way gave me some sort of rush and excitement, while at the same time I felt really uncomfortable. I remember telling my sister to turn it off, because it was all sex, and we shouldn't be looking at sex. But my sister said that those women are just dancing and it's all normal. I can remember that deep down it felt really wrong to be looking at these images, even though I couldn't explain why it felt so wrong. I still can't explain it.

I told my father about what happened the next day. I remember telling him that my sister found a videotape with sex in it and we watched it, and that she didn't want to turn it off. I asked him some questions about sex, and if he thinks sex is fun. I remember my dad being mostly silent and he did not want to talk about this subject. I said "I think sex is stupid". But I still don't know if I meant it.

My next encounters with pornography were mostly the kinds any kid my age experienced. First, most porn I saw flashing by on the television when I stayed up too late. Sometimes lingerie brochures would get into the mail and I would peek in them. One day our family computer got a virus and porn sites would pop up. I remember my dad looking into the problem. The websites would pop up and he looked at them, even scrolling down while saying "what is this?". I was confused why he didn't just clicked them away but spend so much time inspecting the pictures before taking action. I guess my dad was also interested in this new phenomenon of internet porn.

This all happened before I really became interested in sex and pornography. I sure was a young teenager (around 11 or something like that) and became a bit more curious. But I had no interest in wanking to pictures. There was a lot of fuss about sex amongst kids in my school and it was often a subject to make jokes or naughty comments about. But I was not that kind of kid. I always wanted to stay away from it, because it just felt wrong. The last years of elementary school I became more interested. I remember looking into sex-ed books, but being only interested in the drawings.

Around the time I went to High School (age 12) I became interested in porn. I had two educational books about sex, but I mainly used them to look at the pictures. I learned about masturbation from those books. I tried it a few times, and nothing happened. I didn't even like it. Until one time, I reached orgasm. It was a feeling I had never had before. A strong tingling in my penis glans, although nothing came out. I thought something was wrong with me and tried again and again. I only did it about once a week, but after every time I felt guilty. It was a feeling that I shouldn't be doing this. I had no religious or conservative upbringing, so it was not an external guilt. It felt wrong from the inside.

Around this time we got high speed DSL. Internet porn was getting big. I went first went to picture sites, but as the internet speed got faster and videos more available, I went to pornhub kind of sites. I looked at hard core stuff, and I discovered more varieties. I knew that I was attracted to boys, but I looked at both straight and gay porn. Until I found my favourite gay site. It was based on boys, just old enough to be legally performing in porn. So they were around my age. Around this time I got my own computer and I looked at it more and more. When I was 16 years old, I looked at porn every day.

This continued and I mainly looked to boys my age. Sometimes I lost interest in this genre and looked at straight porn again, even though I definitely not straight. I tried different, more extreme types. I will not get into details here, but the types of porn I watched around age 23 was nothing like what I liked when I was 18. In five years my porn taste moved from that of a healthy gay boy to that of a complete sick pervert. I tried some of these sex acts in the porn in real life, but they never were never as good as in the videos. I also moved from watching videos to chatting online about those sex acts and fantasising what it would be like to do them.

Right now I feel trapped, while at the same time I'm motivated to quit this addiction. It is this battle that is really draining my energy and lust for life. But I will not give up!

 

I noticed that my relapses usually occur when I have either a lack of structure, or stressful events or both. To combat this problem I will get in the routine to plan my day beforehand, and also plan in healthy recovery activities such as checking and connecting on NoFap, meditating, reading books about the subject and yoga. I have made this a recurring todo item in my Todo app, so I'll be reminded to do those things every day.