I think the clouds have finally parted except to come back and add colour to the sky.

Hi guys, I think I originally made my Reddit account to be able to keep myself accountable and on track to recover from the life I was living with pornography. It’s been a long.. long time now since I first stumbled upon “your brain on porn” and learnt what I was doing to myself on a daily basis which made me numb to the world and people around me. A few relationships later, doomed by this problem and I finally realised something had to be done. I think I started this journey around 2017 and my god, these years have flew by. I’m 23 years old now and I started pmo’ing when I was in year 9.. probably about 12/13 years old on my laptop I was given for Christmas. I think this is when I realise my social skills had hit rock bottom and my stress was being band aided by porn. Spent the majority of high school and college not really understanding why I had no Will to grow as a person or spend time with friends as any other teenager would of been doing. I still think about the time I wasted and experience/growing up I missed out on.. my friend would of been partying, going to festival/gigs and I was stuck at home playing video games thinking I’m happy. A routine has occurred by this point and night time was the go time for my daily dopamine and brain rewiring to occur. I think for almost 7/8 years I didn’t cry to anything.. relatives had passed away and I was just there with my blank slate of emotions. It’s strange to write this now as I’ve kinda u-turned my entire life around.. I think the turning point in me feeling worthy.. happy.. or even human was when I was watching a documentary on Tony Robbins and I think I cried about 3/4 times within the first half an hour. Really deep emotion hitting tears with my head into my pillow resonating with the people telling their stories and lives. I stopped the video at this point (almost crying rn) and just walked down stairs to hug my mum. Think this was the first time I hugged her in a long time and she just smiled. It was then I realised I was becoming healthy again, my mental barriers were opening up to allow normality and hormonal balance back again.

By mid 2017, I had slowly stopped watching porn as much, abstaining as we do here.. even if it was just for a few days at a time. Once I felt the surge and increase in testosterone kick in after a week I knew something was right about not watching pornography. I started to go to the gym in October of 2017, nothing major but from October to December I lost a stone and half of weight in a 6 week HEAVY cut. Which brought me down to about 7/8% body fat. Was hard but I had the discipline and motivation behind me. By the start of 2018, my sole purpose in life with my new year resolutions was to grow as a human. As that’s exactly what I’ve done. I am a disciplined and natty gym rat now. My reddit history will show you my year’s worth of training and how much I’ve changed this year. I still struggled with porn a little throughout the year but I can probably only count 15 times I’ve pmo’d this year. I’m currently on a 50 day streak and my past one was 70 days. The only reason I broke the streak was because of a partner so I can say it wasn’t porn at least.

But I AM writing this because I know the clouds have parted now and I’m a completely different, happy and empowered man now. With a whole new outlook on life. The benefits I’ve felt have come from the streaks but also from myself as an individual. We create the benefits we hear so much about abstaining and we’re the masters of our own world. I don’t think I’ll be breaking my streak for porn/masterbation again though. So I hope someone out there can read this, resonate with it and realise we’re the ones who create the path ahead, not the addiction we have lived with and live with.