NSFW stuff ahead, probably, I'm not sure what to tag and what not.

Ok now that I have a moment to sit down and type, I'll just throw some info at the page. I didn't lay this out in my head or anything and I don't know what exactly I'm trying to achieve other than getting some of my story on here so that others can look at it once I've got a super duper space ship badge or whatever, and say "maybe there is hope for me after all".

I'm in a fairly sorry state right now. Not in the completely rock bottom, losing your house and your job and your car, type of way. I think that comes mostly with substance abuse rather than porn abuse. Rather in the "functioning addict" way. In the sense that nobody close to me could really guess the extent of my frustration, self-loathing, and hopelessness. This isn't the most unhappy I've ever been, but it's close.

For some backstory, I'm 24 and so I'm one of those who has never known a time in which I had both:

1) achieved puberty AND 2) not been using porn to some degree or another

I had, for most of my adolescence, completely unfettered, unmonitored, relatively high speed internet access, usually in my own room. I was never a social kid, and was severely depressed due to living in a broken home. Rather than getting a good amount of social interaction during and after school, and then coming home and sneaking into my room to use the nsfw parts of the internet for a little bit before going to bed, like a more normal kid might, I went full on "plug me into the matrix, pull my brain out and throw away my body (I fucking despise the thing anyway), and just upload my consciousness to the internet, that I may live among the electrons, because this is my true home". I was basically given a computer by my mom who was too busy working to support us financially and implicitly told "here, raise yourself". Some of you know personally how well that works.

I've held a lot of beliefs over the course of trying to figure life out on my own with nothing but a keyboard, mouse, and blackout curtains. A lot of beliefs I've come to accept were false. Some were beliefs which came about through genuine, albeit misguided, attempts at working out what really is the true nature of things, using only the tools and information I had. Others were nothing more than subconscious attempts to protect myself emotionally. The results of an instinctual defense mechanism that operates a bit like Stockholm syndrome. Convincing myself that my imprisonment by my own demons was just, natural, enjoyable, and beneficial, and that any attempts by outsiders to free me from this were uninformed, biased, narrow-minded, and otherwise intellectually illegitimate meddlings into my own quest for happiness. That all may sound kind of dumb but I think some of you may actually be familiar with these defensive attitudes. Here are a couple gems from that era:

1) "Porn makes me happy. Lack of porn makes me unhappy. People want me to leave my porndungeon (mom's basement) and socialize because it's 'normal'. They are probably miserable because they don't have their own porndungeon because some stupid puritan upbringing convinced them they ought not to. They are unhappy because they are struggling with their own hangups, which prevent them from being honest with themselves, and they seek to ruin my happiness because misery loves company. If only they could be as open minded and enlightened as me, and realize the virtue of constant sensory satisfaction, and stop trying to keep up with the Joneses."

2) "Hmm, as time goes on I realize that my porn searches become more and more fantastical, that vanilla is insufficient most times, and that I am now interested in things that would have been unspeakable to me in the past. This is most assuredly not a case of chasing the dragon, since porn doesn't work the same way as drugs. Additionally, I have been taught by society that all paraphilias are innate, and cannot be learned/unlearned as those silly Christian straight camps claim. Ergo, these changes in taste are discoveries of latent interests, not development of new interests. This is amazing, who would have thought that this whole time I was really into trannies, tentacles, furries, bondage, ssbbw, vac beds, blah blah blah. Just think, if I had listened to other people I would never have discovered all these things that I was always naturally attracted to. It would be like a person who's absolute favorite fruit is strawberries, due to psychological hardwiring, but who has never tasted a strawberry in his life and thus never realized it. A true tragedy and a waste of a life since life is about sensory satisfaction. I had better dive deeper into the seedy underbelly of the internet and make an attempt to fap to every single kink I can find, no matter how extreme, to see which ones I respond to. That way, once I've reached the bottom of digital Mariana trench, and fapped to everything, I will be like a Pokemon master who has caught all 150, and I will finally know what my complete list of kinks it, like somebody who has scratched off all the squares on a scratch card, or uncovered a full grid in Minesweeper. Then my quest for fulfillment will be complete. If only my mom would stop telling me to come up for dinner."

Typing those out they sound pretty ridiculous and I think we all know what is wrong with those theories, but that is how I thought for a time. I don't think I need to explain to the ones who have gone as fucking Steve Irwin with internet porn as I have, just how it works, but needless to say things just got stranger and more miserable. Edging until I was rolling on the floor for 30 minutes with crippling testicular pain, and until I broke the skin on the shaft (no time for lube obviously), practicing tantric audio-hypnosis hands-free prostrate orgasms, photoshopping horrible disgusting non-porn things into porn as a challenge to see if I could still focus on the porn enough to fap without it killing my boner, and just dropping a 20-lb weight plate onto my dick because why not.