Glad to see you're still going porn hell
@zander13, no matter what the withdrawals throw your way.
Fuck porn in every possible way.
Bless you man.
Bless you too sir. I agree, this whole porn shit sucks ass. As always, see you at the finish line.
Just read a story on a long-term rebooter forum, and here is a snippet:
"Like many of you all here I have been on this journey for a while now, 4. 5 years in total with two long streaks, one 18 month and one 15 month both unfortunately ending with long relapses in between."
He is currently questioning why he keeps relapsing, and is worried that he will forever be caught in the porn/relapse death loop. Man oh man have I been there before. Sadly, all I can do is use this poor guy's story as a reminder. This shit can strike at any moment, and it doesn't give a flying fuck about how long your current streak is. It is ambivalent to progress. It doesn't exist within the realm of time. All it needs is a sliver of weakness. A tiny oversight.
The longest story I've seen, as I said, was a month short of 4 years. Only one success story has taken longer than mine. I've passed almost every single person on the internet, aside from a couple guy who I haven't heard from in a while who were a few months ahead of me. My guess is that they are pretty much through it, and their lives have taken up the space that these forums occupy. Or they relapsed.
What upsets me is that none of them have posted updates in a while. I specifically remember one German fella say, many times, that he was going to make sure that he gave back to the community once he recovered. I hope he holds true to that. would fucking love to read another long-term success story.
Anyways, considering that the longest story I've seen is ~4 years, I hope that it's safe to say that I have less than a year left of this nonsense. It's fucking impossible to truly know, but I can't fucking imagine PAWs lasting longer than 4 motherfucking years. Would be absurd.
As far as all that mental health shit I talked about a while back, it was all due to the SSRI. Bipolar and antidepressants often don't mix, but I rolled the dice anyways, and lost. Once I stopped the Lexapro my mind settled down big time. I'm much more sure about where the illness ends and the PAWs begin. No longer is it something I think about. The PAWs is PAWs, the illness is the illness. They are separate entities. I'm sure bipolar helped make the addiction worse, and deeper, but the symptoms of the two are different.
I have no fucking idea when this thing will end. Just like I have no idea how much pain is on the horizon.
What I will say is that I'm still earning inches. Small fragments of progress occur each week, or each month. Like I said before, I've been able to watch movies during certain windows of time. Last night I watched a Tom Clancy one with Harrison Ford and enjoyed the shit out of it. Two weeks ago I watched the entire LOTR trilogy. So there's that. Might go away, but it's still new.
Other things I've noticed are less lethargy. I do chores every day now, even on the worst days. My apartment is always clean, the garbage always gets taken out, dishes get cleaned, laundry gets done, phone calls get made, bills get paid on time.
I'm more organized too, but that kind of plays into the above.
Trying to think of what else. Socially, it's hard to say. I still have times when it hurts like to hell to be around others because I'm in deep pain. I think that this will be one of the last things to go--the social discomfort and anxiety/pain. I still desire to be alone most of the time.
Dreams have changed. They have become slightly more vivid and common. All throughout this reboot I've had hundreds of dreamless nights. 80-90% of the time my nights have been blank, or half-awake.
I get excited by basic sexual acts on T.V. like kissing or good looking women. And this has been consistent. Doesn't matter what mood I'm in, this change has not gone away. Makes me even more vigilant. The Tom Clancy movie last night had passionate kissing and I hit the fast forward button immediately.
Morning wood has been come and go since the start. I don't use it as a gauge of progress whatsoever. I've had it happen to me in spurts since the very start of this reboot so I don't trust it. Given this fact, I will say that I've had MW pretty frequently lately.
Memory and sense of time have gotten better, but it's still not in a normal sphere. I talked to my buddy this morning and I'd forgotten something I had said to him a week prior. As if it never happened. No memory of it. But, as I stated, it's gotten better. When I began this reboot I had ZERO sense of time. Each day was like I woke up from a sleep chamber in a sci-fi movie. I only had a feint inkling of what had happened the day previous, let alone the week previous. It was FUCKING WILD. Now, the days are much more connected. For instance, I have a good idea of exactly how this past week has gone. Not a normal human's idea, but a decent one. I'd say this is a major improvement I've noticed.
I care more about my surroundings. I have turned my apartment into something very comfortable and personal. It actually represents who I am as a person. When I was deeper in my addiction I wasn't able to give a shit about this sort of thing.
I think I've hit a point, very recently, where I don't see women as objects as much. I mean, I still do, but not as much. Porn fucked up my sexuality so fucking much dude. First of all, it turned me into a "simp", as the kids say. When you objectify women you often put women on pedestals because you don't see them as human. They become objects to be worshipped, like a bar of gold. I did this all of the fucking time. They weren't humans but unattainable artifacts that I was DESPERATE to grab hold of, especially as my addiction progressed. Now, at first (high school and early college mostly), I used girls as objects but didn't deify them. I'd just use them as human fleshlights. But then I hit a turning point where I became sort of scared of them. Especially the ones who were "hot". When I was very young I always like the cuter girls with intelligent faces, but porn turned me into some dumbshit who only wanted to ones that were more like pornstars. And it wasn't a natural want, it was a forced, intellectualized want.
Porn is still on my mind all of the time, as is the past. I've never been more sure that a large part of this journey is processing all of the shit that I used porn to numb. Debts need to be paid.
That's it for now. There is probably more shit but I'm tired of writing this.
I'm just trying to be as forthright as I can on any given day. If I'm feeling hellish then I'll say it. If I'm noticing the bigger picture then I'll comment on it. A sign of true health will show itself in the form of consistency. Yes, life is a roller coaster, but it ain't like the one I'm on now.
