Back from vacation, went an entire week porn free and I didn't even feel that bad, or desparate to look at porn. I did end up breaking down when I got back though, I just looked at it briefly and then closed the window. It is really hard to turn that off, I find myself impulsively typing it into my browser now. During the summer porn almost became a virtual hobby for me, I was doing almost nothing but looking at it. It was totally innapropriate and clearly a significant hour of my failing.

2006 was the worst year of my life, I had everything going in and I wasted it all - I gave up everything for nothing: for porn, videogames and another woman. Where am I now? Charles Bukowski's tombstone reads: Don't Try. At first, a startling and offsetting message to the pessimist or the imitator looking for inspiration, his widow however interprets it as: Dont' Try (Just D0) and it is time to follow that advice. Porn is not something I can just turn to when I feel like it, if I am serious about this it means going against my strongest impulses. Even when things get bad, quitting means never turning back.

From this day forward, I am never turning my back on what I believe in.

I can quit and I can set things right.

Tomorrow I go to Cuba, so no pornography there. Which means I go eight days without porn and eight days in a great environment to make a fresh start and come back clean.

I have been unable to quit recently, but my habit hasn't had any major side-effects like it usually does. Normally I can't get motivated to go to the gym, or read or do any work. But lately I have been really pushing myself in the gym and as a result I am as sore as hell. I can't even lie with my legs straight tonight because of the lower body work I've been doing.

The pain in my legs isn't what is stopping me from sleeping, I keep thinking about my now ex-girlfriend and how much I miss her. I wonder if she feels the same, or even if she still cares about me. I keep thinking of all these ways I want to reach out to her and be close, but I am stuck with no way out. Porn and a broken heart are not friends, no matter how closely paired one might think they are. Why would I even bring up my love-life and porn you ask? My girlfriend was the combination of everything you could ask for in a woman, she was sexy and thoughtful. Caring and beautiful, I may never get the chance to experience those ever again. I thought the one thing I needed from my life to clear my head was to find another girl and see if what I had was right.

Clarity is never something you can go looking for, no matter how we try to obtain it. Seeing clearly is something which finds us, in the moments inside our heads when we break fresh ground in our lives. For me, the thoughts of incredible saddness coupled with the speed at which these ideas are moving has allowed me to understand my real problems. For a long time, I was convinced that my only problem was porn and a lack of motivation. I came to realize these feelings were actually depression, the inner workings of my life were not as simple and as impenetrable as I had believed. Rather I had approached the problem from the wrong side, I tried to understand what was going on in my mind by looking at the wall, rather than through a window. Much could be said of the other shortcomings in my life and I guess there is a serious moral to all of this. Being alert, and seeing clearly means rationally understanding and interpreting life as it happens rather than ignoring it for the sake of simiplicity. I gave up on that when I became complacent: my capacity to problem solve, romance and love were swept away when I stopped thinking.

The abscense of this love has filled me with a longing to get things right, the question is: Can I maintain this clarity?

Filling a hole in your life, depression and porn.

For me, my worst days are when I lie in my room and refuse to get dressed. I walk around in my boxers and stare at myself in the mirror. I masturbate to porn five or six times in a day and I basically check my email a trillion times to see if anything interesting came through. I keep putting off the gym for another hour until it closes and I refuse to read anything that isn't electronic. Sometimes I will bid for shit on Ebay and fantasize about how it will make my life better, more complete.

At first I thought this had to do with my relationship with porn and the downward spiral my life has been in. At first it was just arguments with my girlfriend, then it was thoughts of infidelity. Later I stopped going to work, just to lie about and do even less. I refused to go to the gym this whole time and when school started back I was getting everything in by the skin of the teeth. Nothing was satisfying in my life. I started playing videogames again pretty actively, but they weren't the greatest experience either. I found myself thinking:

"It's not that I even enjoy videogames, its just that I dont enjoy anything more than videogames."

The same could be said for many things, porn, ebay and shitty food. The truth was, that I was depressed and my addiction to porn was the greatest indicator of that. The more porn I looked at the more I began to forsake my own life.

Pretty soon I found myself putting on weight, being dumped and scraping by so badly in my last year of university, you could swear it was my first. My social life dried up, my extracurricular activities became minimal and my ability to meet new people diminished.

I started skipping classes, sleeping terribly and making a huge mess wherever I went. I stopped writing, drawing and taking pictures and I became consumed with buying shit and eating fast food.

By the end of all of this, I went out and tried committing suicide. I was too scared of what had become of my world in almost 6 months after dragging myself up a mountain and accomplishing so much. As I stood on the overpass, I realized that my best days had been so recent. My hard-earned success seemed so fleeting compared to my sadness. What I realized in those slipping moments that despite losing so much, so fast it was not impossible to have them back. I walked away from that bridge, I spent a few days getting reaquainted with my life. Truth be told, I didn't realize what I was doing wrong and I made it worse. Things got worse.

But this is not the end.

If you find yourself suffering from these things, having similar moments it is not some suburban disease. This is not a modern malaise which you should accept as a part of your life. Please go get help, realize what you are doing wrong. I did and it is making my life more worthwhile but you and I have to FIGHT for a semblance of reality in our lives.

Totally Compulsive

So for the last five days I have completely gone without porn and it's really bizzare to have to deal with my compulsion to do so. Typing in a porn url into the address bar is almost a compulsion when I get even a little bored. However, when it comes down to it. I immediately close the window and instead begin fantasizing about my girlfriend. This is not an easy system; my girlfriend is currently six hours away for her last year of post-secondary education and sexual release comes less frequently than one would hope. But this is worth it, she had asked me to quit before and I'd sooner take her up on it than retain my compulsion to look at porn.

Something you may need to hear:

Porn is a consuming addiction and it's not easy to break.

I've read a number of resources about pornography addiction and I'm willing to say most of what has been said is usually wrong. Also, the attitude of some people towards how to break away from this problem is not helpful. The best way to solve a problem is to do what best works for you, if that is a secular solution or a non-secular solution that is your own choice. But choices are really what we have in the online world, I've spent the better part of a year coming to grips over what this addiction has meant to me and my relationship. It has cost myself and my partner a great deal of hardship and pain, I suffered from not being able to share things with her and she felt insecure about the infidelity that is implicit in the act of getting off to pornography. The one thing however that I did learn from this, is that we are always in control over when and how we look at porn.

For me it is a reflex; the first thing I can type into a browser bar is usually a porn site, the truth is you need entertaining alternatives, things that aren't titillating. Don't waste your time trying to use softcore, or non-nude pictures of celebrities to solve your problem. In truth, this will only make your desire stronger, to get what you want in it's purest form. What is going to keep you honest, is somone else to talk with about this. If you need to start a blog, I reccomend it. If this doesn't work for you, but you want to draw on our collective thought, please read here for more, or just take away from reading this what you will. For me, this is the AA of my addiction and I haven't utilized it fully. It is hard to keep yourself honest and that is not your fault. In your own eyes, everything you do can be justified and made relative to the ebb and flow of your addiction. Keep it out there, if you need some support from others don't hestiate to ask for it, I personally won't hesitate to give it. Approach people you want approval from, even if it is just the guys in this blog circle.

Another thing that is important; masturbating and masturbating to porn are two different things. If you can do it without an aid, that is what you should do, don't punish yourself with no sexual release. Our society may frown upon you for whatever physical reason you feel insecure and cannot find a partner, or for the amount of times you may require stimulation from yourself or your partner, but don't let that discourage you. You should however be discouraged from using your own personal time to scour the internet for pornography; this personal time is special and you can afford to do a lot with it.

Proposal: from now on whever I want to look at porn, I'm going to post here instead. Be prepared for me to say a lot of nothing, other than shill cries and sexually frustrated grunts. If you hear what I'm saying and you're serious about this, get a blog.

In closing:
Lastly if you're some high-minded therapist/analyst, a relgious fundamentalist or just somone who thinks you take the moral high-ground to people with a real problem you can fuck right off. We look out for our own.

Best,
Anonyomous

It has been over fifteen days since I:

1) Masturbated to porn

2) Downloaded a thumbnail video clip

3) Had any porn saved on my harddrive

It has been twenty days since I last:

1) Had extensive amounts of pornography saved to disk.

2) Browsed a "non-nude" thumbnail site, and a "non-nude" website. (Which is such a figurative term as it basically connotes that the commonplace moneyshot photograph is usually replaced by the delights of full-frontal nudity.)

3) Browsed a pornography oriented torrent site.

The wording of these acheivements is misleading however: I have seen pornography. The siren's call has been too much, a clear conscience is all that has saved me from turning my back on this whole business. The time lost to porn starts to make more sense at the end of the day, there was this blur and clearly an end. Maybe you could call it a high and let's not even bring up the pavlovian effects of just seeing a hit. That trivializes the whole business, it begs to end up in some church bulletin, the soundbyte and quote for some throwaway magazine article. The best part of not using porn and breaking the addiction is the clarity. The blur it creates just seems to be totally senseless, a venture into the abstract and without values.

I mean, if you observed my habits day to day you'd begin to wonder if there was ever a real habit. What do I like to get off to and for how long? Those were all really just integrers and the real determinant was the stream, you could say pornography is more like a coalmine for an addict. You can't see shit, but when you find a pure strain you know you've hit the jackpot. Other days you can spend all day fruitlessly mining for nothing, all the leads go nowhere and if you're unlucky some asshole linked a page you were looking off with incest thumbnails. Literations are so worthless, what I wanted to say is that the last couple of days have opened my eyes to how distracted I've been.

One of the things that you realize after a few days, is that you have no sense of self-worth and even among your own personal relationships. Friends, family and lovers seem kind of meaningless, getting off is a loveless state. The rewards seem to satisfy a need, but pornography does not return the feelings and these feelings seem like non-entity in your emotional state. You invest so much time in porn and it in return invests nothing in you.

Call that a closing thought and something to think about for anyone considering quitting.

Existentialism vs Pornography Addiction

So I've cleared more than two-thirds of my goal for no-porn. Now that is not to say I have not seen porn. My hard drive has been completely free, however I am learning that just because I can avoid masturbating to explicit images does not mean that pornography or my habits would not creep up on me.

I have found myself browsing google image search and yahoo looking for titillating images which would not be considered pornography. A Christina Aguleria fan site here, You Tube videos of women making out, etc. Really these are no better than the masturbation fodder I was avoiding. In fact I found myself simply spending the same amount of time browsing, but not enjoying myself as much as when I am enraptured in porn. However the per-day average and even the recurring average seems to be lowering at fair bit. I also find myself repeatedly going to the website which frequently updates it's image selection with porn, however I do not masturbate to anything. I find myself just looking for the updates, however I know this is entirely an act of self-deception. I know I am simply biding my time until the next spree. What is important though is that I feel even this act of self-control is liberating me from the demand which porn used to place on my time and I can feel my sexual imagination increasing greatly.

Some people might wonder why I am quitting porn, you might wonder if my desire to quit is cause-and-effect or perhaps the result of some demand placed upon me. There is no outside catalyst, not god or my girlfriend or my parents. I assure you, this is for my own sake. I for one, am tired of losing to the void of nothingness that porn creates. Spending money, time and energy has it's great losses when invested in porn. First off there is the time: I work a night shift job for a software company from early evening to early morning, I spend the daylight hours doing my own thing. My addiction to porn got to the point where I could almost never leave the house outside of work. This loss of time has really begun to trouble me, as during my semesters attending university I know exactly how incredibly productive I can be. What makes it worse is that philosophically I am an existentialist and I see myself failing to realize my maximum potential or any potential for a quick trip down thumbnail lane. Furthermore, I have prevented myself from going outdoors to pursue my favorite recreational activities, particularly the gym and reading outdoors due to my use of free time. Shift work really takes the gusto out of your sails when you want to be out and about, meanwhile porn only rewards those who sit and wait.

It is important however that I thank my girlfriend at this time, I recently shared this blog with her and her reaction was the positive kind of thing I need at this stage. If you are in a similar circumstance as myself and you are capable of sharing something like this with your partner consider sharing your outlet with them.

Five days left for the goal and I've never felt more free and clear from the problem. Which is not to say that the war is won, but that it is just beginning.