...at least we can joke about it now, what do I know

Ahahahah. No fucking dice.

And no rest for the wicked. The choo choo train of self help therapy team rocket just reached its next destination:

Urgistan Central Station - make sure to throw a quarter into the fountain of bad justifications, visit the zoo of my most warped sexual phantasies (pls don't), and then later have tea, cigars and magic shrooms with my both vomiting and devouring Id in the pavilion of melting perception of self. Exit through the gift shop, which only sells false promises and truly despicable baked 'goods'.

Finally, I am home. Oo

 

Fucks sake. Mind is being consumed with seeking behaviour for my asshole ex girlfriend. As in, I am thinking of her like I might be thinking about watching porn. I know it would be disappointing to contact her, but there is that part of my brain that says "yes, she'll disappoint you again, but maybe you can get some phone sex out of it or laid if shes in town". And then I go and phantasize about someone I should leave behind, should have left behind long time ago. And its all, all, all the addiction.

There is nothing worthwhile in that person. I'm an okay judge of character by now, and with her I have a lot of data, and there is not a shred of doubt in my skull that I am better off never thinking of her again. And still. Treasonous brain craves that walking, talking bad joke of a person that is no good for anybody like its bloody heroine or something.

This is ridicolous.

 

Absolutely do not contact her. Actually ask her to block you by saying it’ll help you move on. Most decent people will understand and oblige.

 

Hey folks, been orbiting some distant moons, and will, for some time. This is just a I ain't dead but I'm out of office kinda message.

 

Ayo. Still alive. I am, how to say, it's different. Complicated? No. The beer don't help.

I'm okay. Porn has come and gone, like the moon comes and goes. I don't think about it much. Other stuffs moving, in that nonlinear, annoying roundabout way.

There's stuff I've come to understand, and let go in the past two months. A big part of it is accepting there's no control.

There's no controlling life. Or how I, how other's feel. I think I'm taking the scenic route, on foot.

And I've given up fighting porn, honestly. And in the most fucked up of ways, that seems to be the reason I no longer give that much thought to it.

I've also spoken to and finally abandoned that one scott pilgrim level evil ex. It took a lot of strength. But I'm enough. No longer bound up in fighting myself, I am plenty enough.

I'm still in that thicket.

But I don't feel like I'm a ghost haunting the house of my own body so much anymore.

Eh. Too much weird eso hippie shit, doesn't lend itself much to explanations or civil discourse.

But we're getting there, fam. Mostly by getting more and more loose about where exactly 'there' is, but das a mode of transportation, still.

Und er bewegt sich doch.

 

I recently realised what a bloody control freak I am sometimes. I had an all-out laughing attack: me having analyzed my family, seeing it in others clearly, blind to my own version of it. Hah. Fool.

Don't say what you think, they might take it badly. Control it. Do not be authentic. Do not allow the dynamic to play out as it will.

Then go ahead and call it walking on eggshells. I mean, it's true, too. Needs to end tho.

My bloody mother calling me too emotional all of my fucking life, me and my bro dancing around her oversized, yet fragile ego, what a joke. Like she was the fucking Hindenburg and we have flamethrowers strapped to our sorry asses.

When I finally told my ex gf what I thought of her, over the course of weeks, very fucking politely, because boy did I not need to add any insult to what I was saying, and she was somehow able to actually listen I sorta understood.

I control by not saying what I think, by avoiding. And I need to stop before it kills me. Cause it fucking is, killing me.

I need to surrender, give up trying to control other peoples emotions by not being authentic. The times that strategy was working, the times it was necessary to survive have come and gone.

And I need to put this costly tool down, give up. Like I finally, after forever, gave up on that girl. She's in a way healing that I haven't thought possible. But these conversations triggered me into fucking oblivion, and I had to kick a lot of deadra ass over the course of weeks to get back. And while shes getting better, shes lightyears away from being as emotionally capeable as I want a partner to be. And between us lies a romantical, sexual, relational Verdun. It was time to give it up.

In tandem with that, it's time for the Hindenburg to go exothermal reaction majeure as well. Always boom tomorrow, like Ivanova told us.

My avoidance-fu needs to die, and I need to be straight with my mother and tell her to her face why she almost never sees me anymore.

And that she drinks too much, on top of that. I have little faith in the productivity of that conversation, but I fucking owe her the chance of an interventionist warning shot right to the bow.

My brother can't and won't do it, for reasons, and I feel I'm going to face the music anyways and I'm the older one, so I am happy to take one for the two -man ass-strapped-flamethrower Zeppelin dancer team.

And go down (or up) in fucking flames. Whats going to happen? Nothing.

I can't keep that shit to myself forever. I need to surrender control, surrender that avoidance shit and speak my mind, and be okay with whatever happens then. No controlling it.

It won't be pretty, and she most likely won't listen, but what has to be done, will be done.


PS: It's interesting how little the issues I am tackling now have to do with sexuality, pornography, erections and all that stuff. And yet its the same thing, in the end. What a maze it is.

 

Just rambling, fam.


We climb. The winds sing, tug at our hair.

The ship of the self is adrift, it's sides torn open, crew gone or dead. Has there ever been crew, to begin with?
Or was that one of these wishes I have felt so often, so strongly that it had become one of these semi memories, apparitions of my stuck mind thinking the same silly shit each and every day anew.

I swim out, closer to the middle of the lake. The weather is to kill for, the water is clear. It even has fishes. We drove out for the day, and once more I find myself
getting more and more used to people around me having a car at their disposal. As the sun dances on the surface level of the water I recall that weird feeling of being comitted to maybe dying for going swimming.

When my photosensitivity was way more pronounced than nowadays and my brain was more prone to seizures than it is these days and that unending flickering dance of
light might have well fried my mind into grand mal in the middle of a lake as such as this. Funny thing, I still went swimming. I just had to be okay with maybe going down in the light, so to speak.
The memories of that time are faint, but I do recall the feeling of living in another medium than most around me, with another sense for that vague storm in my very skull. How close it was, how far.

Seeking moderation not for the sake of morality, but to keep that storm at bay. If I had seven beers on Monday, it was better to have five on Tuesday than zero. These days are gone, but I made a decision (or rather, it seemed it was made for me) to never, ever take hard drugs. It has served me well, and I am weird enough on my own without ingesting anything with three or four letter abbreviations.

Why was it so easy to follow that rule? I have friends who to this day, without fault offer me cocaine when they do it, even if they've known me for years and I never, ever touched the stuff.

Because I know I would fucking love it, and because I have had enough trouble on my hands, I guess.


I have been fighting something, somehow, for always ever now. Well, long spells of time I didn't fight back, was overrun, conquered, expelled into that irreal next door dimension where I stuffed my self away when I just couldn't deal.
Family commented sometimes about how I was fleeing into dreams and wholesome shit like that. I mean, good on them spotting that, making a tone deaf comment and then carrying on with their day.

I'm pissed but I realize there might have been little that they could have done, being who they are, knowing what they know. I always needed to see my way out on my own, that lateral, complicated climb up that metaphorical mountain.

It would have helped if they hadn't tried there crude attempts at fixing me, too. And these comments on how I am too oversensitive, and read too much psychology into everything. ( Bonus points for when they come to me to parse some interpersonal shit out, because all of a sudden I am not overly emotional but SO understanding and wise. Fuck them, really. :3) Musta been scary for them, too, me picking apart our shared and individual hang ups, learning, looking at shit, parsing it all out. Being the first one to stop giving a fuck about talking about going to therapy. Being the identified patient, while the rest was tending to their wounds in their private places, still so obvious how we all have the same shared shit.

"Well whats wrong with him?" Because it was clearly wrong with me, specifically, and not with us, as a loosely connected tribe, that at the same time is bound by the steely grip of shared, hand-me-down trauma. Fuckers.

"Why do you not feel okay? Why are you depressed again? Why didn't you prevent slipping into that again? It couldn't have been me, it couldn't have been me, it couldn't have been m2e" and so on. I mean of course it wasn't them, thats not how that shit necessarily works, but its still hilarious with what vigour, what power these around you need to annihilate the thought they might be connected to or guilty of that thing thats about to devour a family member.

And then they club you over with their advice, their insight, that can only ever be so good. Because boy, if you do not dare to look at your own dark shit, all that fear, resentment, all that guilt, phobia and hatred in your own heart - how the fuck are you ever to get better?

There was one person that did that in my life. He died way too early, but still this is what I learned from him. Surrendering, admitting that shit is hard and admitting we are barely in control, that control might be pointless.

I feel I am learning how poisonous that attempt at control can be, too.

And with that feeling that I had, all my waking, warring life, that faint magical thinking of "If I get myself in order, the rest will be possible" while people yelled at me "the rest is the only thing, you are just lazy, oversensitive, bla bla bla", I feel strangely vindicated.

Cos these days I have been able to be with myself more and more, not that ghost that haunts my body a few days a months.

Being myself. Letting go of all that sad shit, all that triggered rage, all these voices in my skull, of family members, past lovers that I played over and over until they bear no resemblance to the people that once spoke to me.

I had do all do it by myself. And now I am learning, and scar tissue starts to dissolve and I feel like a real fucking person.

Still swimming I turn around, swim back. I feel so good I can hardly hold the feeling. She sits at the beach, with a cigarette and sun glasses and her asshole dog, that charges at any other dog regardless of size.
Haven't had a friend like that in a long time. Fellow hiker on the climb back from the pit.

Trying to give people my genuine thoughts, not trying to control how they take it.

 

Had that talk with mother, about the last fight we had, her alcoholism and how I feel she needs to address it.

That woman is evasive as all hell, but I wasn't having any of it. I don't give a fuck anymore. She tried to push all my buttons. I told her these buttons are all broken from overuse. She did the old "you're emotions are not appropriate" BS.

I told her how saying that didn't seem very appropriate, too. And so on.

We basically played the "No, you" game for a while, until, after about an hour of sieging we had something of an actual emotional exchange in between of all her usual crap.

And I got my point across about how she needs to deal with her addiction. That's the one thing I needed to do, really. What she does with that advice, I don't fucking know.

I guess our relationship will be better, but there's also no going back. With how we spoke yesterday, I think I will never be as open about my life as I once was with her. And I no longer feel the need or obligation to. She fucked up enough. We can have peace, but that don't mean I will give her much room to fuck up again.

There's just no bloody use.

So, now I have to let all that stuff go and get on with my life.

 

Trigger ahoy warning: mention of sex toys, also uselessly long

two days in utter limbo, today going to the country side with friends.


two days of being completely stuck in my skull, watching netflix and youtube in forever mode.

as much as I feel there was progress of some sort I also feel that my means of transportation has just completely broken down.
like travelling by booster rocket, it gets you somewhere else but it also consumes itself, leaving you stranded somewhere between where you started and where you wanted to go to.

where am I?

quit smoking for seven months
porns been a while ago, switched it for memories/pictures of my ex, but I'm losing that habit
still masturbate, mostly sensation
been drinking alcohol on an on and off basis, and some of the days after are just dreadful
no pot

I also picked up using sex toys, which felt a bit like a morphing of my porn habit into something more physical.
I ordered a bunch on the day the communication with my ex went south and I decided to call it quits with her for good.
at that point we wheren't dating or something, just talking about the shit that went down between us in the past. still triggered
me hard.

I think for my brain browsing the sex shop was roughly the same like browsing porn. and then you order stuff, and then - and that's weird, really -
it becomes an item in your real space. and sometimes expectation vs reality is way off. and somehow that feels really, huh.

you know, when you close the tab after PMO and you feel kinda gross. and then picture that as a physical object. in your room.
that you cannot shamefully alt+ f4 into the oblivion of you pretending you didn't google that.

and I went and bought that shit on the day I finally gave up on a person I wanted love from. friendship. and shit.
I mean she is seriously hot and yes I also I wanted sex, DUH, but you know what I mean.

I don't know. I also binge bought a lot of video games on steam and gog, summer sale broke my little addict brain, I guess. then I gamed for some time,
and then it got boring. everything only seems to work for a time.

picked up meditating, doing yoga again, then dropped.

the thing I am getting better at is not fighting it all as hard as I used to. I used to, for instance, delete any picture, chat, raunchy voice message of my ex in purging orgies.
now I just keep that shit. and for some reason that makes it way easier to get bored by it.

I absolutely do not recommend trying that at home. it's just what weirdly, weirdly worked for me in that regard, but I feel I have readily established I might be a bit on the ...special side of things. a bit.

anyhow. I cut ties. she was in town last week, said she was "willing to talk and clear the air". I just wrote

"Nein, danke."

and I have somehow managed to not follow it up with anything, anymore.

letting it go, same as I am letting go of my rage, my expectations, my hopes for my mother. it is the same structure, in the end.
mommy issues, like a friend of mine said.

I feel, nah, I frankly am ultra useless. I won these fights, by my own metrics, but I seem to be riding with my boi pyrrhus again, still.

my rocket ships depleted, I crash into the desert, again.

the clean cut from PMO drugs netflix/yt bingewatching isn't going to come. cannot get it done. stuck with this crude, iterative process.

and y'all are stuck with my non edited, non polished journal shit. sorry. I wish I would be able to write with brevity and shit.

can't fam. just text projectile vomiting here. and therein lies a part of the trick: bleed, fail, stumble forward, look at how base and crude it all is,
tries honesty, try to not give a fuck of what the recipient thinks. and then get over how awkward it all is.

repeat until sane, I guess.


I'll be on vacation for two weeks. I will kick my MO thing in that time - I'm thankfully not super keen on beating it when I'm sleeping in the same room as other people. Anymore.

The trick is in not going back when I come back. I actually, after a year atfer my bf broke up with me, am getting an interested in dating again. and in the past two weeks I met
four dudes that I found interesting, just by walking around town, meeting my friends and being my adorable thirty something self. still too dumb to get anybodies nunber.

but what ever work I have been putting in, it seems to have had some sort of effect on how ppl receive me. which isn't completely new, bth.

I am a sucker for having options and never bloody making use of them. I mean, all that stuff about not wanting to get hurt bla bla bla? It's bullshit.

I'm just an avoidance type pokémon. and I have to kinda multiclass out of it. giving up that illusion of control that is not doing it. giving up these daydreams I hid away in.
drop out of hyperspace, wake up, have a good old crypto sleep vomit on the floor, break the seals on the airlock, come back to fucking earth.
be that bloody ghost that auto-resurrects like an egotistical lich that has giving up on the bad guys to do the job for him.

and we climb, and the wind fucks up all the fancy hairdos we carfully combed over our receding hairlines, and we unzip the zippers on our scar tissue as life idly draws lines on our manly faces like a five year old on the bathroom wall who has found aunties super expensive lipstick and hasn't been checked on in the last 60 seconds. what do I know.

 

tw: mentioning if sex toys

Still travelling, nice change of scenery. MO'd twice, have a single room (which I didn't expect).

No porn, for quite some time now and the deathgrip/pied shit I had going on is way better (and also getting better still.) at home I switched to masturbating with a fake pussy toy versus manual. I'm aware its a crutch, but I feel like I'm able to get closer to being able to have sex as its reducing death grip (my sensitivity is increasing) and also I'm getting used to the physical aspect of it.
I mean you can do planks as well, idk. I'm somewhat hopeful normal sex is either in reach or about to be. Penetrative sex never really worked for me bc of the pied and the overstimulation from death gripping it even with pied. I had sex mostly by way of oral, but getting me to come was always an ordeal. I was so used to this that I actually had given up on penetrative sex. Now it looks like I'm a real boi after all. Lol.

Apart from that I'm living my best life right now. No real clue what the future is holding or where I wanna go, but I feel there's a lot of weight gone off of me.

Some of it is porn. Some old wounds I'm letting go off. And bad ideas about myself that I'm also leaving behind.

In part it is just the summer being nice, too.

But I haven't felt so good in my own body so often, so regularly and reliably in, well, ever. Yup. Ever. Huh.

 

I have been on this page almost four years. I kind of want to read it from start to finish. I am a bit hesitant, as that would be revisiting a lot of hopes that didn't come to fruition.

I am also closer to my goal of letting go of porn than I was ever before. I just ...stopped at some point. Not MOing. But opening sites and watching videos. I do not even have the exact date.

And as we move on, so do our objectives shift, until they are altogether changed.

Like burnt up booster rockets doing their graceful twirling good bye-dance as you correct course, having successfully climbed the well of gravity.

They are gone soon. The scorch marks on your outer hull will stay for a while longer. It's okay to be just who you are, this ain't no tutorial section, fam.

Ain't no purgatory waiting room in hell, either, but lads does it feel like it sometimes.

And then, and if for a moment, the venn diagram of who yer sposed to be and who you are goes full circle.



I don't know, is this the start of a fade to black here? My problems and solutions as of lately have had so little to do with porn that I feel my time might be coming to a close here.

 

Been thinking. I'm not done with this. Not to say I didn't make progress, I did. Not as clear cut as I wanted it to be, but hey.

I feel the need to go further. One reason is just curiosity: Where can I go? What can I get in that wide world?
Another reason is this basic truth: I have managed to get away from porn, cigarettes and weed, through a lengthy
process, and by morphing my porn habit into a habit of masturbating with toys and to mostly sensation.

My PIED is going away, but I still overdo indulging in MO. And the toys are a crutch, okay to lean on for now,
but I also need an exit strategy for that, a plan. In the end I want sex to be something that I have with people,
not by myself. And the position I have at the moment isn't sustainable. Climbed the gravity well, but fam, we cannot stay here.


I have been avoiding meeting new people. It's been a year since my last relationship broke up
with me. I have dated two people since then, both shortly and without any real interest. Sometimes hook up culture
feels like ordering a pizza, then not being hungry when it arrives, just eating it bc it would be ...sort of a waste, idk.
But I want to do that again, date people. Find somebody, get to know people.

And it's of course the soul that was ailing, when I grasped for that crutch MO, very early in my life.
There's a lot of people who seem to just be getting addicted cause the thing is so powerful, and I have
never been one of them. Damaged goods, baby, always have been, still on the mend. Always will be.
I made a lot of progress in that department in the last year, too. But I am far from done there, too.

The further I progress from my beginnings, the more life feels like that brand new car
that you want to take for a ride, just for the fun of it. But this, too, needs to be learned.
And there's so much shit I am not as good at, as I might be. Stuff I haven't even tried, really.

And so yeah, I'll stay here. And I want more tangible goals. I've always been impressed by the guys
who where good at just having clear goals and apt measureing of these goals. I understand this is also
to a degree a personality thing, a question how your brain tends to work best, but hey, I might try that as well.

I will need to take some time and reflect how I want to do shit, and what I want to achieve. But not super long.
Just some time to recalibrate, get some perspective.

Day: negative 3.

 

Hey fellow drifter,

first off, I always like to read your journal. You have a unique way to convey what you experience and think. As chaotic as it might be sometimes, it's always thought-provoking and stimulating. I know you know that but I just wanted to express my appreciation for your presence on this board once more.

I think, the wish to leave this place behind because of the fact that porn doesn't tempt you as much anymore at the moment is reasonable but please be wary not mix things up: Porn will always be the drug of your brain's choice. As soon as shit hits the fan - and if you know life by now, you know it will happen sooner than later - , it will ask you for a fix, whether you are still registered on here, or not. Der Wunsch ist oft Vater des Gedankens, you know the drill, baby.

The goal should always be to make a healthy life sustainable whatever that means. Being almost 3 years clean, let me tell you that porn is not out of my mind and I still have to "fight" urges on some days or the other especially when I'm short of meaningful human connection. I'm not writing this in order to play the role of the big admonisher but rather to give perspective of someone who has been (or is?) in the same trenches as you.

We are short of sunlight. Don't be fooled by a calm day at sea is all I'm saying.

Take care, Brudi!

 

ah. I was going to make plans and then the week just flew past me in a rush of beer, theatre rehearsals and drunk escapades.

hm. happens.

 

oh my. falling for somebody who's about to leave town, and hanging with them like they are going out of style.
cos eh, they are.

pretty lost in the open fields, my infatuation, in getting drunk and high and all that stuff.

I have nothing to say in my defense. but the explosions are kinda pretty, and I haven't liked someone like that like that in a long long time.
what more to ask for.

Edit: ah there is one thing. I haven't relapsed to porn, although I did some looking at sites. but I caught meself. having fallen in love kind of curb-stomps the attractivity of porn into fine powder. why look at randos when you have some who you are even entertained by when they complain about their dumb boss?

 

fuck me dead.

I knew this would bring up some feelings, but I underestimated how hard and fast they'd come at me.

all that shame and sadness and shit from the past, and then cover it up with an endless stream of endlessly exploited bodies,
a grim parody of the intimacy and kindness and all that wholesome shit we wanted in the first place.
rip out the heart and then use the torn remains for pleasure, because what else is there cept for that ...void and consumption?

saw a piece of art at an art uni show once: a piece of pink plastic strung up on a wooden frame like a deers skin, representing the bodies of young girls, commodified.
bit on the nose, I know, but:

what is this fucking horror show world we live in?

gods break me if I should ever lie about why I came here: cause I had no erections anymore. that's the reason, nothing else.
but still, the deeper I look at it, and the reasons why I did it, not just porn, the whole lot of using anything to cover up that gut wrenching feeling of shame and sadness.

how did we end up here? how did we get to accept the idea that we are nothing more than hungry things wanting to fuck hot people?
(not claiming to speak fo anybody else but me, but I'm not vain enough to believe I'm the only idiot who got duped.)
insidious, is what it is.

I want out of it. not only out of using porn, I have managed that for a good while now, somehow. but out of that whole fucked up world-view.
aaaaaaaaah, times of infatuation and rage and deep digging.

time to hit post before I delete it out of general cowardice.

 

Hey Drifter I have not read your posts before but you say some really though provoking things in a really cool way. I found things in the most recent one about the commodification of women and your question "what is this fucking horror show world we live in?" resonated with me alot. For me in fighting my porn addiction I have become so much more self aware and so improve other areas of my life that I sometimes wonder if I had not gone through the addiction and now am coming out the other side I would have been worse off. In a nutshell good can come from this very very bad shit. All best,
Old Tom

 

“I need to surrender, give up trying to control other peoples emotions by not being authentic. The times that strategy was working, the times it was necessary to survive have come and gone.”

Oh man so recognizable. This is a truly important one. Goodluck on your journey!

 

"Horror show" you say? Right on the money. The question is what we're doing in response to it.

Alice Cooper was a genius when he put it in these lyrics:

 

Ahahahaha. Read that quote, found it fitting, didn't realize at first I have written that. Need to look closer at what I write, so easy to forget what we found to be true. Weird.

Yep. True that. I like the "I was so offended" part. Cos we are, and so often we take it anyways, our own bloody selves protesting against the shit we consume.

What's our response? Some sort of refusal, I feel, some sort of counter strategy, I feel. We can't just be offended, we need to be in constructive opposition. Do the "not today, satan" dance. Ah.