A Letter to an Old Friend
Making amends will help you move forward in your recovery from porn addiction.
Dear old friend,
We go way back, but I don’t think we were ever very close. I want to change that. Consider this letter a means of reaching out to you, opening up my heart, and lending you a hand that, for once, intends to be helping.
Let it be a celebration of our history together — one that honors the bad moments, of which there were plenty, as much as the good ones— and a first step towards reconciliation. Writing this is my way to say thanks, say sorry, and put behind our problems to start fresh with a new and much better relationship.
You were there from the very beginning. A tiny wrinkled peanut sticking out of my newborn body. As I familiarized myself with my own anatomy as a kid, it seemed to me that you were just another part of it, albeit perhaps a weird-looking one. You met a single, very specific purpose, and that was the extent to which I ever paid attention to you. Back then I was not yet aware of the unique potential you had to cause pleasure — a potential only matched by your capacity to inflict unbearable pain. Unfortunately, the latter was the first lesson that I would learn.
Water splashing, foam sprouting from my head as my dad shampoos it, my submarine toy insisting on coming back afloat through my fingers. As a six-year-old, taking a bath was a genuinely fun experience. I wasn’t one of those kids that dreaded bath time, I enjoyed it and looked forward to it. Or so I did, until the day when my dad reached out during one of our baths and grabbed you.
As a kid, I was no stranger to pain, but I had never felt it in you before. My dad’s attempts to pull back your foreskin sent shock waves of pain through my body. I remember crying and screaming for my dad to stop. I couldn’t understand why he was doing that to us. The procedure became routine and bath time soon turned into a terrifying ordeal.
I now understand that you had a problem called phimosis, and that the doctor had recommended that manual and rudimentary approach to deal with it. As it turns out, my dad was only trying to help you. Unfortunately, it would take years for me to come to that realization. At the time, the incident was a traumatic experience that put an end to the neutrality of our early relationship, and cast a shadow between us that was, perhaps, behind some of the problems that we would face later on.
A few years went by, and when the phimosis episode was a distant memory almost forgotten, something happened that would bring you to the fore again and change our relationship forever.
I discovered masturbation when I was ten years old, one night in bed while playing with my stuffed animals. Somehow during this gameplay, I noticed that rubbing one of those soft toys against my crotch gave me a new kind of interesting pleasure. That would eventually evolve into a more sophisticated technique involving my pillow, where I would lay down sitting on one end of it and bend the other end towards my chest, pulling it up and down to firmly but gently stroke you with it. This unusual new game proved to be way more enjoyable than the ones I had been playing before, and the pillow soon replaced my stuffed animals as my favorite toy.
Those early, roughly achieved cum-less orgasms with time developed into a more refined and customary manual practice. I stroked and struck gold. Fapping was a revolutionary discovery — a revelation of the great wonders and pleasures that you could introduce to me. We entered puberty hand in hand, and for a while were pretty much inseparable. During our particular honeymoon phase, anytime and anywhere was good enough to have some fun together.
Even in those initial and exciting days, I could discern the incredible power that those sensations had over me and the dangers of it all. As an early teenager, I did all sorts of crazy stuff just to wank one off, like making erotic drawings of my classmates or that time when I sneaked into my sister’s friend’s bedroom to look for used panties. My hormones were already starting to drive me nuts and perverting the relationship that I had with you.
Then the Internet arrived, and that’s when I completely lost control.
Getting high-speed Internet at home as a teenager was like gifting an album by The Smiths to a suicidal kid. All of a sudden I had endless fuel for my self-destructive tendencies. I could use porn to keep you hard for as long as I wanted. My young mind filled with horniness and insecurity craved the easy consolation of that momentary bliss and struggled to put any limits to it. The binges extended for more and more hours each time as I developed a crippling addiction to Internet porn.
I compulsively watched porn throughout my whole teenage years, hooked to the dopamine hit that I got from every new video. This addiction consumed me completely and prevented me from developing sexually in healthier ways. For a long time, I ignored the negative impact that porn was having on my life, but I was even more blind to the ill effects it was causing on you.
It all became a bit too obvious the day that my addiction hit rock bottom. One night, after watching porn for more than seven hours, I noticed I was having problems keeping you hard. It wasn’t uncommon, you always seemed to get tired during long sessions and have a need for an extra gear to keep going. This time, however, nothing seemed to bring you back to life. When I peeked down into my pants and looked at you, my heart skipped a beat.
You were barely recognizable. An amorphous pile of overflowed meat, unresponsive to touch and looking wider than tall. After so many hours of stroking, the tight grip of my hand had been too much to bear and you had collapsed under it. In my blind pursuit of more and more new videos to feed my addiction, I had totally disregarded you and, finally, broken you down.
The reality of what I had done to you slowly started to sink in, as I grew out of the mesmerizing effect of porn. Panicking, I tried to google the issue, praying that it wouldn’t be as important as it looked. Eventually I decided to go with it and wait it out for a few days. I was ashamed of you and me, and wanted to hide it all from family and doctors at any cost. Denying you the medical attention that you required was just a way to put my needs first once again. In the end, you recovered on your own and I got back the fully functional and healthy penis that I didn’t deserve.
Far from contrition, what followed was a fall back into my damned habits. The addiction was by then too deeply ingrained in me for even something like that to stop it. I continued to abuse porn and even broke you down again on two other occasions. Only after many years, and once I was well into my twenties, did I start to gradually back down on my porn usage and make active efforts to combat this addiction.
That incident was just one of many physiological hardships that you’ve had to endure during all these years. I remember the day when I found out you were still suffering from phimosis. The same condition that had tainted our relationship early on came back when I was a teenager. I only caught on to it after casually reading about phimosis and seeing myself reflected on the symptoms described there. Once more, I kept it to myself out of embarrassment, and you were able to single-handedly heal and dispel my growing anxieties about it.
A few years later, we would both go through a rough period of medical conditions and visits to doctors. I started suffering from an undiagnosed psoriasis that targeted you harshly, making your skin constantly dry and irritated. To make things worse, a genital wart randomly appeared in the affected area around the same time, confusing the diagnosis. Eventually, the wart was surgically removed and the psoriasis correctly treated, and you recovered well from both issues once again.
It seems like throughout the years all you ever got was shit, and yet you seemed to overcome every obstacle and come back from it untarnished. In a way, that made me overconfident and I wrongfully learned to take you for granted. It wouldn’t be until much later that I would realize the true gravity of everything that I had put you through and the damage that it all had caused to both of us.
My mid-twenties were the period in my life when I finally broke out of my shell and started to lead some sort of dating/love life. I was impatient to get out of my hole of shyness and inexperience, and losing my virginity was the turning point I had been anxiously yearning for so long. Imagine my frustration when I finally got a chance to do it, and you didn’t stand up for me.
I struggled with erectile dysfunction for years, dragging it along with me throughout my whole dating life. And through all of that and for all of it, I blamed you. I blamed you for not getting up in front of any girl — when I most needed you — no matter how much I wanted to have sex with them. I blamed you because you did not seem to have a problem when it was just you and me (and porn), but you retreated the moment things got real and stakes were high. You were the deadlock that stood between me and the accomplishment that I then saw as the key to turning my life around for the better, and I hated you for that.
I now understand that you were not the problem, but just another victim. My years of abusing porn had conditioned you to a very specific kind of stimuli, and someone else’s handgrip, a mouth, or a vagina were not what I had trained you for throughout all those years. More importantly, the real blocker had never been in you, but way up here in my head. My acute performance anxiety was keeping me from relaxing and being present, and it was that fear and not you that was ruining the whole experience. It wasn’t fair to ask you to be braver than I was myself.
Since then, I’ve learned to accept my responsibility and work on my issues. Your response to my progress has been amazing and I’m proud of how much we’ve both improved during this time. It hasn’t been easy, but we are at last in a place where we can both enjoy each other again in a healthy way. It makes me really happy to finally be able to have fun together, share you with the person I love, and, even if only after many years of struggle, bring you some well-deserved joy.
We’ve sure had quite a history, you and me. I’ve loved you and I’ve hated you. I’ve been disappointed in you. I have mistreated you. I’ve taken pains and pleasure in you. Our path has been full of ups and downs, but at the end of the day we are in this together, and always will be. I want to assure you that I’m committed to making the rest of the path a much better one for both of us. But, before that…
I wanted to say sorry.
I’m sorry about the way I treated you all these years. I’m sorry I abused you, using you as a mere instrument to my addiction. I’m sorry I was ashamed of you and blamed you for my problems. I’m sorry I disregarded your needs and neglected your well-being.
I also wanted to say thank you.
Thank you for always being there for me. Thank you for showing strength and overcoming so many obstacles. Thank you for not giving up on me and coming along in my recovery. Thank you for all the good times we ever had, and the great connection that we finally enjoy together now.
As every boy learns sooner or later, a penis is not just another part of the body.
It’s not something you can neglect or take for granted. Certainly not something to abuse or mistreat. Yet your penis shouldn’t be the center of your world either. It doesn’t prove your worth nor should its pleasure be your only priority. It is neither your enemy nor your God. Your penis is your friend, and you should treat it like one. Be kind to it, respect it. Give it pleasure, but also space when it needs it. Take good care of it and look after its needs. It will give it all back to you times ten and open the door to great pleasures you never even imagined.
This goes for all the good moments that await us.
Penis, my old friend, I love you.
What’s in your math folder?
Do you love your penis? Do you show that love in the way you treat it?
Your penis suffers from your porn addiction as much as you do. Hurting it is hurting yourself. Part of your recovery is learning how to love yourself, and you can start now by showing some love to your penis.
Write your own version of this letter. What are you grateful to your penis for? What are you sorry about?
Share your insights in the comments below, on social media, or in your favorite porn addiction community, and if you know others that are struggling with porn, help them by sharing a link to this story.
Let’s start a conversation!
Hi, this is James! Thank you for reading!
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