By Anonymous
I was about fourteen when I read my first porn story.
It started out innocently enough. I think I’d had The Talk by then so I knew the basics. But I was flipping through some fanfiction one day and I noticed there were different ratings so that piqued my curiosity.
I wish I’d never looked because it just… It was a rock slide from there out. It was just down and down and this vicious cycle that refused to end. Because it’s not something that you can just CONTROL. It’s worse. You THINK you can.
And it’s not something you go around bragging about, either, like other hobbies. You read or you write or you draw and you share that with people with pride, you want to talk to people about it.
But with porn, it’s something you hide. Even if it’s your first experience with it, you know deep down that it’s WRONG, and shameful and you want to hide it and then you feel guilty for ever looking at it but you can’t STOP because it reels you in. And that’s what happened to me.
I liked to write and draw and I’d read books. And then I found porn and I knew, somehow, that it wasn’t something I wanted others to see me reading. I didn’t want them to know that I had an interest in something like that. But it wasn’t enough to STOP.
I’m 21 years old and my addiction started at 14. That’s SEVEN years of struggle that I can’t reverse. It doesn’t stop. It hasn’t. I still struggle. There are days, weeks, months, that I’m fantastic. I don’t look at any of it and I’m proud. And then I get this…squirm or something inside me and I peek. It’s just a peek. But I immediately wish I hadn’t. Because then I’m guilty about it. I stayed up so late reading something that I’ll regret for weeks after.
When I was eighteen, I finally admitted my addiction and it was the hardest thing I could imagine doing. It was humiliating and everyone who knew judged. They don’t trust what you’re doing when you’re alone. It makes you feel sicker inside about it. I didn’t even know if I trusted myself when I was alone. Sometimes, I still wonder if I do.
It’s hard, too, when in a relationship. It’s hard to admit to it, because you don’t know how they’ll react. You don’t want to say anything but you know it could be detrimental if you don’t. And then there’s that uncertainty about it. Why do you want to keep looking at porn when you have someone REAL right there? There’s so much trust that can fracture and break when you think about the idea that you’re reading or watching or looking at porn behind your partner’s back. There’s so much WRONG with that idea.
You don’t talk about it to friends. You don’t want to. It’s your own secret. A burden. A lie you tell yourself so you can try to cope with what you’re doing. It’s not fun. There’s nothing glorious about it. You’re not missing anything by not looking. Once you start, it’s difficult to stop. It’s so HARD to ignore the niggling in the back of your head that BEGS for you to read or look or watch more.
Maybe I just haven’t found my cure yet—a person, or a hobby or whatever you want to think will help. But I know that it’s hard RIGHT NOW. And I keep wanting it to get easier.
I want people to know what it does to someone. It could be ANYONE, even when they think they don’t have an addictive personality. You don’t need one to fall victim.
I hope that others can prevent themselves from being sucked in as I have failed to do.
I will keep struggling because I want that day to be here when I can talk to people without feeling like I’m hiding something huge from them. I want to be able to enjoy time to myself and not feel that there’s an internal war about what I could be doing with my time on the computer. I want to come out of this battle victorious.
But, more than anything, I want people to know about this. I want them to realize that there is nothing beautiful about porn, there’s nothing real to it, there’s nothing beneficial to anyone to look or read or watch it. It becomes something of a battle for yourself.
It’s horrific.
It’s like the sirens in old mythology: the idea, the song, pulls you in until you drown. And drowning is pretty accurate. There’s nothing marvelous or fantastic about the cycle of guilt that porn brings with it’s presence.
Just don’t do it. It’s unhealthy. It’s not fun. It’s sickening. And the more you humor it, the sicker you get inside and all these ideas from it creep into your thoughts and you feel sicker and sicker until it’s starting to feel like nothing can help you.
I am doing better. It’s not easy. The temptation is always in front of me but I want to be a better person. I want to update this story one day and say, “I beat it. I won my battle.”
It’s not even a big battle that you want to go around telling people about but it’s a battle that I know I’ll be better for after winning.
You don’t want to fight this battle. Please don’t give yourself the battlefield, the ammo, for a fight you don’t need in your life.
