I have not been writing recently in this diary, for one and one reason only - I needed to make a fucking plan.
This is going to be fairly long, same as my realisation. So buckle up.
This has been my first month of NoFap- August 2020. In this 30 days, I relapsed 10 times (Including some of the binge and chaser sessions). This made me realise a lot of things. The past days have been difficult, and depressing. They gave me a lot of opportunity to actually think about my life, about how fucked up it is, how I have ruined it. It gave me a shot to become real as fuck with myself.
I realise that I was just totally winging it. No plan, no strategy, no amount of thought whatsoever. Just one day, I was sick of what I was doing. My marks were at the bottom of my class, everyone had surpassed me, I was constantly flunking tests, not even watching classes. The quarantine had totally fucked up everything for me. It had been the downfall of my life. I was doing fairly well, when I was in school dorm before, with all my buddies to keep me company. I still fapped, but without porn. I still needed it, like a drug, every 30 minutes or so, to keep focussing. Every 25-30 minutes, I fapped for 2 to 3 minutes for studying, for the post nut clarity, which I thought gave me a boost.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
When the pandemic hit and we all were forced into our homes, all hell broke loose for me. I started bingeing on porn like a monster, fapping 7-8 times per day, edging for hours on end, because it was available, and studying, waking up, showering, hell, even brushing my teeth in the morning and eating paled in comparison for me. I wasn’t even motivated to eat, while in that state, and whenever hunger hit, I munched on a bag of chips and just kept jerking. My marks deteriorated to virtually nothing. My energy levels dropped down to hell. My parents started to take notice I was fucking up somehow, but they really couldn’t say exactly what. They kept scolding me, telling me to work harder, but I didn’t listen. I just wanted to keep cooming. I lost a shit ton of weight, became just like a lollipop, skinny and weak. I lost all my energy, couldn’t even get out of bed. All my friends stopped talking to me, and I didn’t care. I became weak af, to lift even a carton of milk, but I didn’t care. I had the internet and there were millions of porn videos to indulge in what more could I want? I was in pain. I was in hell.
In short, I had hit rock fucking bottom.
Then come the motivation state. I wanted to stop. I realised how bad I was fucking up. I watched a shit ton of NoFap motivation, read a book in who knows how long, and started downloading apps from playstore, installing blockers and shit by mid July. None of them stuck. None of them worked for more than 2 weeks. I thought I am lacking motivation, I researched more and more into porn, saw more and more videos, I found this app and found this forum. It gave me an immense boost. Discovering this community was the best thing in my life in a long time. I met many of you guys, and accepted porn as my mortal enemy, and I thought my purpose was to beat it. My goal in life was to never fap again, my purpose- to never jerk off again.
Big mistake.
In spite of this, I cheated. I failed miserably. I relapsed. After each relapse, I told myself “You know what, fuck this. Now you relapsed. Now, from this second onwards, no more fap!” Cringe.
All these failed attempts made me sick. Made me even more dissatisfied with myself. Even when I had a community, with all this motivation, with accepting porn to be my arch enemy, I still relapsed. I still fapped. This made me think? Why? What is the reason all of us keep going back to porn? Even people with 100 and 200 days of streak fall. Why? By that time PMO has lost their hold on it already. Then why the fuck do we have the tendency to go back? We know this is evil. Why the hell do we have urges in the first place??!
I travelled to my core, searching for these answers. My focus shifted from what porn is, and what it does, to what life is, what it means. I dug out my roots, my innermost demons, to figure this out :
I sucked ass at handling my emotions. I was introduced to fapping and porn when I was 12.(I don’t really remember how or why. It doesn’t matter) Then, it was the best thing on Earth. Like manna, straight from heaven. I was thrilled and enthralled by it. I used to go visit cousins just because they had faster internet and I could stream shit faster in higher quality. I shut myself off completely, got to fapping. At first, I felt like a King, everytime I fapped to porn. I quickly learned how to last longer, fapping. After a while, shit slowly went south.
You see, I was using it to vent my emotions. I fapped because I felt I was weak, wasn’t athletic for shit, socially awkward, skinny, felt frustrated with my studies because I wasn’t putting in effort to figure stuff out, felt my parents were disappointed in me, I was lazy and and procrastinating. Even before porn, I had these problems and I was using other mediums to escape this reality - movies, tv shows, videogames. No sports, no athletic ability, zero friends, nothing I was passionate about. The only thing I could say for myself was I got fairly good marks. (a result of shameless cramming and rote memorization, which amounts to less than zero levels of education.) Bottom line, PORN didn’t fuck up my life. I DID.
For me, PMO is not the disease. It is the fucking symptom. This past month, I was trying my best to totally quit porn, to stay away, not to relapse. But I failed, big surprise. Because I was treating the symptoms, not the disease. Porn didn’t make me a slacker-procrastinator, porn didn’t make me weak, porn is not the reason I am socially awkward, porn is the reason I have zero work ethic. The problem was myself, I have been giving this addiction way more credit for my destruction than it deserves, in order not to feel the blame and shame myself, in order to get sympathy, in a desperate attempt at self pity. I convinced myself I will live like a god, I will have a super awesome life anyone was jealous of, all I needed to do was quit porn.
I do not have a shitty life because I watch porn, I watch porn because, according to me, I have a shitty life. I am lazy, weak, socially awkward, a beta, have no passion or direction in my life. I fap to get a momentary escape from my shitty reality, because my brain is like : “Oh it doesn’t matter you cannot talk to a real live girl IRL face to face, you have millions of girls waiting on your phone if only you go home, lay on your bed and open this site. This is too difficult and boring, the other thing is tons of fun! Let’s go do that!” I fap because I have a shitty life, and fapping makes it even shittier, and dements any small prospect of progress because I am not doing the work, I am just leaving my problems and am attempting to run away, because I am scared to face them. And every time I run away to the evil embrace of porn and masturbation, seeking comfort, I leave my problems to grow and accumulate, to worsen. My shitty life, my lack of ability, made me turn to porn.
This journey is not about quitting porn. I don’t think trying to quit porn this month has not improved my . condition at all (not just because I didn’t have a good streak) because I was still living the same fucked up escaping mentality. It would NOT make even the slightest difference if all I did is stop wanking all day, and instead turn to YouTube, anime, series, and whatever I use to escape.
For me, all the other activities were just to help me quit porn. I started exercise, because I thought I could divert myself from urges. I started meditation, because I thought I will get the willpower necessary to deal with urges. I started studying, because I wanted to keep myself busy, to stay away from urges. My whole existence became focussed with urges and how to beat them. I was running on willpower fumes only, just spraying it all over the place, teeth clenched, pushing it through one day at a time. I lasted 11 days.This is something like eating vegetables to remove the fat from the body. Fuck that. You eat healthy because it is what you are supposed to do. You exercise, because you are supposed to. It is who you are, who you are supposed to be for you. Life is not about removing evil. Life is about doing good. Life is about creating, enriching, acting. This is the right way to live my life. The ONLY way to.
“The pain from the addiction exceeded the comfort it provided” -This was the only reason for my efforts at NoFap. The boost and motivation was given by the dopamine burst which came as a result of trying to quit the thing that was causing me so much pain. As the pain numbed, my life came back to neutral from the downward spiral, it was back to the problems I mentioned. All those discomfort kept coming up, I had to face all my insecurities. My brain, when faced with that discomfort once again, kept pulling me back to the ONLY thing it knows, the ONLY solution IT knows, the ONLY escape I had taught it, PMO.
This is not about me trying to quit porn anymore. This is about me getting my shit together. Facing all my insecurities, all my discomforts, one by one, and figuring out how to deal with them. This is no longer a battle against porn, because it is not even worth my attention. This is, a battle for improving myself. To completely unravel the lifestyle I was living for 17 fucking years, to actually start living my life, without escaping. It took me a month to realise this simple truth.
I will be continuing my journal entries here. I had been writing a lot in my notebooks at home. I have the beginnings of a plan. I have somewhat, the direction I need my life to move towards. I am at the crossroads. Now, this is time for action. Brothers, change your mindset. Change the perspective, if you haven’t realised this. This is not about quitting porn. This is living life. This is not just about saying no to PMO. This is also about saying yes to life. I am, saying YES to life. I will continue to block off porn, masturbation in every way, shape and form, but that is not my priority anymore. Porn is just a hindrance to the life I have potential to live, not a mortal enemy I have to spend a lifetime fighting. This is how we do this, NoFap. This is the difference between failure and success. I am walking this fine line right now. This is time for action. The time for deliberation is over. This is time to practise what I preach. Even in frustration, I will find solutions to my problems. The prospect of studying scares me to death? Why is it so? What can we do to figure it out? This is going to be my mentality from now on. It is time to face my bullshit, burn it out in it’s entirety, to live a life, worthy, and at peace.
I reclaim my life. NoFap, is just the beginning.