I am not Bustin Offman

[Busman]

Yesterday I looked up Reboot Nation for the first time, after yet another marathon session the night before. Yesterday I deleted my stash of porn, 179 gigabytes worth, because it's way past time I did. I only mention the size because I'm astonished at how large it has grown, incrementally, over the years. It's taken some 10 years to build up, with a couple of relationships slowing things down for some of that time. I downloaded rather than streamed because then I can keep them forever, right? My own harem, as I've read somewhere else on these forums. Well it may be my harem, but I'm the slave. I want back my time and, more importantly, my imagination. It shrinks. Used to be, it was wide open landscapes and big skies. With porn, it's a jungle distance: I can see about as far as I can stretch out my arm. Every spare moment is about relieving my cock, and the walls close in. And they're covered in painted ladies: always new, always the same. I'm monkey-minded, and as my hand returns constantly to my penis so my imagination returns to my lizard brain and I find all I can think about is the easy pleasure. My mind is being stifled: all jack and no work makes me a dull boy.
Now, I feel neither relieved nor bereaved at the flushing of my stash. I feel like I'm waiting to feel something. I don't know if this is because it's still the holidays and I need to see what I'll be like in the normal run of things, or whether I can really just separate off some 20 years of porn use and look back at it like an alien world, as I would at exotic creatures behind aquarium glass. That's kind of what it feels like at the minute. It feels easy. I can't imagine it will be. But I'm determined to dig out my mind from this apathy and obsession. The monkey mind is the engine within us and our human intellect and imagination, that have made so much and thought so freely, they're driving this ignorant machine, making it something more than its biology. When the intellect sleeps, when the imagination is asleep at the wheel, that engine still runs on, heedlessly, satisfying its own ends, not worried at all about crashing. That's where I'm at. I've tried to turn myself into a machine. Now I'm going to try to turn back into a man.

 

[Feetfirst]

Welcome Bustin! Good to have you here dude. You will find plenty of support here. Use it frequently it will help your recovery. By the sounds of things your brain needs a break. As does all of ours! You are clearly a very creative and intelligent person albeit somewhat tormented right now. It'll come good, you've made the hardest step. All the best. Feetfirst

 

[Fappy]

Porn has the potential to ruin lives and crush any hopes for a normal future. This is great that you have realized this awful truth. Use this fear to motivate you to quit forever.
There is nothing good about porn. You have everything to gain by quitting it.  :-*

 

[Dharmabum]

Hey Bustin,

Welcome, and good job on deleting what sounds like a hefty supply of viewing habits. 

Deleting files like that can be very liberating, but yes, then there's a "now what?" feeling.  You just cleared out everything you've relied on to calm nerves, create intrigue, and fill your time.  Now what? 

For starters, come here.  Read the stories, share your thoughts, ask for help and give your own point of view from your experiences.  It really does help. 

Find someone that you can share this with in your offline life:  a friend, a relative, a therapist, a support group.  It really does help to say this stuff out loud to someone who won't judge, but will listen. 

Read all you can about the addiction so you know what it's trying to do to you as you walk the road to recovery.  The addiction can take us through many withdrawal stages and temptations, some of them rather blindly, so the more we know, the more armed we are to avoid getting knocked off course. 

And if you do find yourself having to reset your counter or dust off and start again, do so.  I doubt there's a guy here who has just stopped and never hit a detour on the road. 

What I see in your writing is a guy who really "gets it" and sees that porn, while an addiction, is also a symptom of something else that needs repairing.  The talk of monkey mind, our intellect, etc tells me you get that this is about learning to reprogram and then become the masters of our mind, rather than just "avoiding bad habits."  We have to rewire ourselves, and we do that by replacing the bad with something good and meaningful.  When we feel lonely, horny, anxious, etc, we've turned to porn in the past.  Taking porn out of the equation is part of the solution, but if we don't fill the void with something positive, we find another negative outlet.

I can testify:  every time I tried to stop viewing porn, I'd eventually act out by flirting on Facebook etc with a female friend or two.  Subtle stuff, but it was intrigue and it gave me an outlet to be enticed.  Then my wife caught me, and that was worse than the anonymity of porn.  It was people we knew.  It was humiliating to her.  It was a step beyond my initial addiction. 

So, fill the void.  Fill the void with something good:  exercise, meditation, prayer, reading, volunteer work, journaling, writing, painting, music, building something?anything that makes the monkey mind work in a new way, so it can learn where it is supposed to go when you're restless. 

Good things await us all if we can master 'self'. 

This is a good place to start.  Welcome, and I look forward to cheering you on!

 

[Busman]

Thanks guys,

I really appreciate your time and encouragement. I have been looking through a lot of online help today, since waking up from the big drunk of last night. It's been highly educational and some of the personal testimonies are particularly powerful. I do have any number of writing and musical projects which porn has squeezed into narrow windows of time in my life - now I only need to stop all other ordinary means of procrastination to get them done. I'm hoping that a clearer and more focussed mind will help with that. I'm going to have to take a different approach to dating websites too. I have been scrolling through them in a desultory fashion, but perhaps it's similar to the Facebook thing you're talking about Dharma: I'm looking for the stimulus of attention, with little real attempt to connect. It's another form of endless novelty to scroll through on a computer screen. Probably best if I knocked it on the head for a while, until I feel like I'm motivated to do it for the right reasons. Anyway, here's to walking the road with all you fellows! Happy New Year one and all.

 

[Busman]

I'm heading for a week now without a wank, despite what my counter says - that was set on the day I joined the forum and my last session was the Monday before. So I'm going to make one week, for shit sure, then my next target is one more week. I've had cravings, which seem more like reflexes, particularly when I sit down to try to write. Sometimes it flows, sometimes it's like wrestling fog, and it's at these points that a little voice goes "Well you could just go and have a wank". Because that'll get you to the pleasure quicker and with less pain than hard work will. But there's nothing to show for it at the end: the spirit is not lighter (quite the opposite) and the tissue is unfertilized. I've often paraphrased to myself, sadly, after another wasted evening watching callous oafs penetrating women pretending to like it, a piece of advice from some famous author: writers write - what you are is a wanker. But even such incisive self-knowledge couldn't stop me. Self-pity seems to be ineffective too.

I've watched a few videos going over the ground in the last few days. There was one with a Buddhist monk which was particularly interesting on the nature of desire. A really fascinating insight into the practical application of a philosophy I don't know a great deal about. I still kind of wanted him to break a spear on his neck or beat up 30 Manchu warriors, but I guess that's just another symptom of my general attempt to escape from maturity. He mentioned something I've always told myself about watching or reading porn: it's worthless, utterly worthless. I don't want to look back and say that's how I spent my time on earth. The reward it gives us is totally illusory, which is why it vanishes instantly with orgasm, which is why we have to keep going back for more. There's absolutely no physical, social, intellectual or emotional benefit to it. A necessarily solitary pursuit, it only drives us deeper into ourselves - and it's pretty dark and lonely way down in there. It's just a load of unhappy, unfulfilled people watching a load more unhappy, unfulfilled people having robotic sex. I don't know for sure, but I assume they're unfulfilled, because I can't imagine anyone really dreams of having emotionless sex for a living when they're growing up - and if they do, I reckon it might not turn out as well as they thought it would.

Now, this is a pretty bleak picture, but I only bring it up because it's yet another reason not to watch porn. It's an industry, and the people in it are hapless cogs working to churn out product which they then try to persuade the hapless public (sorry: consumers) that we want. Someone's making money out of it, but it's always the exploitative shitbags at the top. The same kind of shitbags exploiting sweatshop workers or making the Transformers movies, for instance. Some people say porn can be empowering for women, but the examples of that argument are few in number and in any case the power simply to degrade and exploit other women is not really worthy of the name. The trouble with most shitbags is, they believe everyone else thinks like a shitbag too. I think most people on here have proved through their self-awareness and determination to change that they are not the shitbags they are assumed to be, but human beings. The human mind is amazingly resourceful. We have, through innovation, teamwork and sheer bloody-mindedness, adapted ourselves to every environment on this planet and beyond. We have endlessly conceived of and developed new societies, artforms and ways of living, and there'll be plenty more before we're finished. What couldn't we achieve if we put our minds to it? Not just globally, or nationally, or even locally, but amongst our family and friends, our own little communities? We shouldn't let ourselves be reduced to just our most primitive instincts when there is so much more we could do with our lovely big pulsing brains. Anyway, speaking of primitive instincts, the football's on, so I'm off. I've gone on a bit here, but as Mark Twain said: I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn't have time.