Hey man, I hit bottom twice. Once in 2012, was still a virgin, in my room playing battlefield and litterally jerking off all day while smoking weed. I was going crazy in my room, and I thought "fuck that", I bought a backpack, and a one way ticket to Bangkok. I ended up travelling for 5 months.
Over there I discovered women and sex (no thai girls lol). It was a real struggle because of erectile dysfunction, so I started using viagra and even took stupid risks, but eventually I managed to lose my V-card, and sleep with a few girls. I was hooked. The end of the trip wasn't so good though. After a few rejections (I was new to this whole thing and didn't know how to handle them) I started closing up and....yep...started watching a lot of porn, in my room with the blinds closed, while people from all over the world were out having fun on the sunny beaches and socializing. But at the time I still didn't have a clue that I had a porn addiction.
When I came back home, I dedicated all my time to pursuing women. Brainwashed myself with the whole pickup thing. I also finally discovered about my porn problem because with every single girl I met, I had erection problems, even though I didn't feel nervous at all, so I started googling and found the TED talk and then yourbrainonporn. This is when I realized how big of an issue porn was for me.
After having pretty long streaks, working on myself etc...I started to feel good, and I thought I was ready to socialize,make friends etc...so I left again, this time for a year in Australia.
Living in a flatshare was a complete nightmare for me. I realized Nofap didn't fix my social anxiety at all. So what happened? I started drinking to numb this social anxiety. Waking up everyday feeling terrible. One thing led to another and I started using porn again to numb the pain, even though I was clean for more than 200 days before coming to Australia.
After a month of relapsing, I decided to pull my shit together, and started focusing on the gym. I was still in Australia at that time. I managed to pull a 300+ streak completely clean, and after my year in Australia I decided to go to Thailand.
Once again, I realized my social anxiety was STILL there, and the cycle repeated itself. I would drink on the beach, go to parties, pull girls, fuck them, then wake up in the morning feeling terrible, disgusted with myself, social anxiety to the max...and once the girl left, I would watch porn. I was so low I simply had no chance of resisting.
This is when I hit my second rock bottom, after 5 months in thailand of partying and fucking girls. I had slept with 5 girls this week, and I felt miserable. I was completely abandoning myself by drinking,smoking and indulging in all those bad habits, just to try to use a girl for a night to numb my pain and loneliness.
In that week I discovered JOhnny Berba's channel on social anxiety, and it made me realize a lot of things. It made me realize I was wearing a mask to attract those girls, and wearing that mask was causing me a lot of pain, because deep down I don't want mindless sex, I want intimacy. I also read the book Healing the Shame that Binds you that week, and it opened my eyes, and made me realize that porn was just the symptom of something much much bigger, and that Nofap wasn't going to do anything for my social anxiety or deeper issues.
So now here I am, I've been clean for a while, but I still have a long way ahead of me to fix the damage. My life goal is not to overcome social anxiety, so that I can start making videos and programs to help other guys that struggle like I do.
I believe hitting bottom is a good thing. It's when you hit bottom that you start discovering deeper aspects of yourself. In the end it will all come together, and you will be a deeper, more compassionate human being, at least I hope I'll get to that point