The Boy That Would Only Play with Himself
A story of social anxiety, porn addiction, and other fun things.
I don’t have any tattoos, but if I were to get one, I know exactly what it would be.
Twenty years ago, when I was a little boy, my parents rented a house in a beach town for the summer. Not long after moving in, while I was still new in town, I remember taking a walk with my mom and seeing this kid coming out of his house just as we passed by it. The kid was holding a ball, and from a distance he showed it to me and straight up asked me: “do you want to play?”.
Being the scared little boy that I was, not only did I not say yes (even though I absolutely wanted to), but I actually decided to keep walking as if nothing had happened, completely ignoring that poor kid despite my mom’s attempts to get me to respond.
That kid, as it turned out, ended up finding other friends, while I got to spend the rest of my summer playing ball with myself — a scared boy watching the other kids have fun from afar, never daring to approach them.
If I ever get a tattoo, it’ll be the image of that kid holding the ball out to me: a symbol of life inviting me to play, and a reminder to always accept the offer.
This is the story of that scared little boy.
A boy so afraid of others that he once stood locked inside a public toilet for over half an hour, because he was too afraid to ask out loud for help.
Nowadays you would say he suffered from social anxiety, back then the boy was just shy.
He was so shy that, for a while, his soccer teammates thought he was actually mute, because every day he would show up, play with them for a whole hour, then leave, all without uttering a single word.
The ringing of a phone when he was home alone was enough to send the boy into distress. A stranger knocking on the door would leave him paralyzed with fear, till the moment he could hear with relief the sound of footsteps receding.
If Macaulay Culkin had been anything like this boy, that movie would have been very different. For one hour and forty-three minutes, the audience would have gotten to see Joe Pesci and that other guy sacking the hell out of the house while the boy lay under his bed, curled up in hiding.
Even at a young age, the boy would always feel self-conscious about his shyness.
And how could he not? His classmates would always see it as a sign of weakness and a reason to exclude him. His parents would always urge him to speak up, to fend for himself, to muster more courage.
Shyness was always portrayed as something negative.
None of his idolized heroes from his favorite movies, books, and comics were shy. They were always bold, shameless, extroverted. And if they happened to be shy, overcoming it was typically part of their character arc.
So, naturally, the boy grew up to reject that side of himself.
He learned to see shyness as something that needed to be fixed.
Yet no matter how hard he tried to fix it, he would fail time and time again — and the more he failed, the more he would hate himself for it.
When the boy entered his teenage years, things took a turn for the worse.
All of a sudden, the stakes for everything social were so much higher. No longer was being shy just a holdback — it now felt like an existential threat. Being unpopular as a teenager was just as bad as being dead, and it was tough to play cool when he could barely put two sentences together in public.
Sports saved the boy from heavy bullying, but there was something that being good with a ball couldn’t help him with. Something even more important in the life of a teenager than earning other boys’ respect...
Girls: the boy’s ultimate kryptonite.
He was completely incapable of talking to a girl, much less flirting with her. The mere idea of hitting on a girl felt so far-fetched: making himself vulnerable, finding the right words, dealing with rejection… he could never bring himself to even try.
As he advanced through adolescence, his body would put more pressure on him to act, but his mind would always keep him locked in position.
Once again, the boy had to watch the other kids play — mingling with each other, going on their first dates, having their first kisses — while he stood alone on the sideline, too scared to participate.
It was then, more than ever before, when his shyness really took a toll on his self-esteem. When it truly and profoundly made him feel ashamed of himself. Like a hopeless and pathetic loser. Broken. Inferior to everybody else.
And that’s when porn entered the scene.
The boy was drawn to porn like a fly to a succulent pile of stinking shit.
It was a match made in heaven. Everything that the boy had been craving so badly — countless girls, the secrets of sex — was right there, available behind the screen of his computer, without him having to leave the house or interact with anybody. What a deal!
He bought right into it, and what started as a few occasional videos gradually spiraled into crazy long binges. It got to a point where he could watch porn for five, six, eight hours straight, while neglecting everything else and even hurting his own body in the process.
If porn was ever useful in helping him cope with his shyness, it didn’t last very long — pretty quickly watching porn became counterproductive. The boy was never more shy than after a porn binge. Those endless sessions would destroy his libido, leaving him an emotional zombie with no drive whatsoever to pursue anything social in real life.
Before long, it became obvious how his porn habit was only perpetuating his problems: his social anxiety, his isolation (from everybody else, and from the opposite sex in particular), his terrible self-esteem…
Porn only made things worse — so much worse that after a while it became impossible to ignore.
But by then it was too late: he was addicted to it, and he would continue binge-watching it regularly for years, digging himself deeper and deeper into a dark and scary hole.
Climbing out of a hole like that can be pretty damn hard, but it’s not impossible, and the boy is living proof of it.
In the years that followed him hitting rock bottom, he embarked on a long personal journey. A painful but rewarding process of self-improvement, led by a series of decisions, big and small, that pushed his boundaries like never before.
He decided to spend a year abroad. He forced himself to approach strangers, to be exposed to new experiences, to live constantly outside of his comfort zone. He slowly but steadily built his confidence around girls, struggling through a bunch of awkward first attempts to get to enjoy his very first results.
He overcame his addiction to porn — and this might have been the hardest thing he had to do. He recognized the feelings that lay at the core of it. He learned healthier ways to cope. He identified his triggers, and went out of his way to avoid them. He persevered, seeing every relapse not as a failure but as an opportunity to improve.
Little by little, it all came together to lift him up. Yet even though time played an important role in it, and gaining positive momentum helped him a lot, make no mistake: time and momentum alone would not have saved the boy.
He fought his way out of that hole, inch by inch.
By the time he got out, the boy wasn’t a boy anymore: he was a man.
And a happy one, at last.
I’ve come a long way, but in many ways I’m still that boy.
Even now I’m quiet and reserved, for the most part, and socializing with strangers is still not my favorite thing in the world.
Yet in many more ways I’m miles ahead.
Shyness doesn’t cripple me anymore. I can deal well with most interactions, I have a healthy amount of friends, experience with girls, and a long-standing relationship.
More importantly, I’ve finally learned to accept myself.
I now understand that there’s a difference between being shy and being an introvert. Sure, I will never have the outgoing and chatty personality that I used to always idealize, and that’s totally ok. Being at peace with my introversion is what’s allowed me to focus on the other aspects of myself that I can and should improve.
Eventually, I’ve managed to strike a healthy balance between the person that I am and the one I would like to be. I continue to challenge myself to become better, but at the same time feel immensely proud of who I already am today.
I know that if that scared little boy could see me now, he would feel proud of me as well.
Come to think about it, maybe I’ll get that tattoo done after all.
What’s in your math folder?
Do you struggle with social anxiety?
Do you think that’s playing a factor in your problems with porn?
Porn can become a refuge from social anxiety — a substitute for all the things that your own inhibitions are depriving you of. Yet using porn as a coping mechanism is a slippery slope that not only won’t fix your problems, but will actually deepen them.
If being shy is having a negative impact on your life, learn to work on it from a place of acceptance, while avoiding the traps that lead to addiction.
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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