The Day That My Addiction to Porn Hit Rock Bottom
Sometimes you don’t realize how bad your addiction is until it’s already too late.
A man never looks more forsaken than while sitting on the toilet.
The mirror in front of me reveals a partial view of my sad figure. My hands hold my head in desperation and my pants snake around my ankles like shackles. My eyes, the color of raw meat after staring at the screen the whole day, open now wide and incredulous. Between my legs, my penis has swollen to the size of a ping pong ball.
Nine hours of watching porn have completely sucked the life out of it. The erection that it proudly held for so long is now completely gone. It seems to have collapsed into a large lump on the right side of my penis, as if the vessel that was keeping it hard had leaked somewhere along the way, spilling blood over all the wrong places. The bulge, soft and painless, more than doubles the width of my penis, making it look almost like a third testicle.
As I evaluate the damage, the tender touch of my fingers contrasts with the agitation that lives inside my head. I catch myself starting to hyperventilate and try my best to calm down, but summoning the composure is hard and hushing the blaming thoughts almost impossible.
“I’ve gone too far this time, haven’t I? And now I’ve really fucked things up.”
Sitting down on that toilet, trying to figure out how in the hell things took such a gruesome turn, the memories of the day engulf me.
The day that my addiction to porn hit rock bottom started just like any other day.
There was no fight with my parents, no embarrassing accident at school, no catastrophic news or traumatic events — nothing that I could later on look back at and blame for what’d happened. Perhaps it was just a silent buildup of invisible things finally catching up with me. Given how my addiction had been escalating, maybe it’s just something that was bound to happen sooner or later.
Whatever the case, I went through school that morning, came back home to have lunch with my mom, took a nap, and even found some time to work diligently on my assignments, all without an omen of the looming danger ahead of me. It wasn’t until 6 p.m., when my mom left the house, that my day derailed, setting in motion the chain of events that would eventually send me to that bathroom — late into the night and with an injured penis.
Years of compulsion make you develop some weird associations.
One of mine was particularly strong: being home alone irrevocably meant that I had to watch porn. So when my dad left the place that day, I immediately shifted toward my computer and opened the browser on incognito mode, as if puppeteered by an irresistible master.
Aside I laid a half-baked essay, welcoming the opportunity to procrastinate. On the screen, tabs began to sprout like mushrooms: tube sites, previews, full catalogs, new videos, related videos, Google results, category pages. For every tab that I closed, five others took its place, like some sort of pornographic mythological hydra. When the clock struck 8 p.m., the monster was already so colossal that it kept everything else in my world out of sight.
Perhaps this explains why I missed my first opportunity to escape. It was around that time, two hours after being left alone, that my parents came back home. Stripped of my privacy, it seemed like the most fitting decision was to abandon the mission, call it a day, and jack off in the bathroom while invoking in my mind the most enticing scene I’d been able to find in the two hours I had spent watching porn thus far.
What I did instead is shut my bedroom door, plug in my headphones, and continue watching porn.
Leading up to this decision were years of an unhealthy relationship with porn.
What started as curiosity in my early teenage years gradually spiraled into a questionable hobby at first, and a full-blown addiction soon after. Porn turned into my go-to mechanism to cope with negative feelings like stress, anxiety, and loneliness — all new to me as a high school kid.
By the time I reached college, my self-destructive patterns were so ingrained in me that, far from emerging as an opportunity to break free and make progress, my early twenties only sunk me deeper, worsening a habit that completely hijacked my love and sex life.
I was 21 the day that my addiction hit rock bottom.
By then, using porn to evade was my norm, and hours-long binges had become commonplace. Watching porn was my preferred form of escapism. It was how I often decided to spend my time.
What happened that day wasn’t an accident. In a way, it was due — a natural step after more than eight years of rampant abuse.
With my parents now at home, there’s an added element of risk to the whole ordeal, but other than that the session follows its course.
Two hours of porn rest upon my shoulders already, which means I’ve barely scratched the surface of all the new porn that’s been released since I last did this a few days ago.
As I move towards less popular sites, finding the videos behind those previews gets tricky. This time-consuming process eventually takes me to some shady torrent sites. The many downloads that I start from there are planted seeds — a commitment to the future.
My second chance to save the day comes just one hour after the first when my mom calls me for dinner. Later that night, in the aftermath of the catastrophe, this will be the moment that I’ll remember the most and regret the hardest. Because, then and there, I stood a real chance. Sitting with my parents around that dinner table, I had the time to reflect on what I was doing and recognize where it was all headed. I could finally snap out and find the clarity of mind to stop it all before it was too late.
Thirty seconds after finishing dinner I’m back at my desk, door closed and headphones plugged in. If the reality of that opportunity ever hit me, it didn’t do it hard enough, and now I’m out of reach again. I bring those unforgotten tabs back up and awaken the dormant beast.
With the stream of new videos running dry, I start to dive into old catalogs and obscure websites, hoping to unearth long-hidden gems that might have eluded previous expeditions. Every few minutes, I get happily interrupted with yet another finished download, expanding my options and giving me material to drag out the night.
My final chance to escape my fate comes at 1 a.m. when my dad goes to sleep, but by then it’s already too late. I’m in way too deep to just call it off now and go to bed. On the contrary, with my parents out of the picture, this is my time to finally enjoy all these videos peacefully, without having to be in a constant state of alert.
I bring my pants down to my knees and turn the volume up.
The next few hours aren’t easy.
I’m now down to my seventh watching porn, and my body is feeling it. My eyes are bloodshot, my ass numb, and my penis is beginning to suffer from the heavy workload.
I google for stolen passwords to porn sites, firing my last bullet in an attempt to find novelty within the vast archives of the big-name producers.
The stakes at this point are extremely high. Once this far, I’m terrified of finishing because that would force me to face what I’ve done. So I just charge forward, thinking that as long as I’m watching porn my mind is occupied and avoiding accountability. Of course, this only makes things worse — yet that in turn only adds to the incentive that keeps me going.
As I open preview after preview and video after video, I take nervous glances at the clock on my desktop bar.
1:15 a.m. (I’m copying and pasting username-password combinations)…1:38 (I find a working pair for one of my favorite networks)…2:12 (a trip to their earliest videos reveals a bottomless pit of exciting new content)…2:44…3:27…
Just how much longer I would have been able to go I’ll never know. Eventually, with my insatiable mind incapable of setting any limits, it was my body that had to bring the whole thing to a stop.
It wasn’t immediately obvious to me that something was wrong with my penis.
I just felt my erection gone, and I couldn’t seem to bring it back up. Yet it wasn’t the first time that I had struggled to stay hard by the end of a binge as long as this one, so I didn’t think much of it. I merely took it as a sign that maybe (just maybe) it was a good time to wrap it up and call it a day.
I headed towards the bathroom to finish in the toilet, and that’s when I realized what was truly going on. My heart sank at the sight of it. That swollen penis was the culmination of the self-destructive marathon I had submitted my body and mind to — dying evidence of the extremes that my issues with porn could reach if left unshackled.
I stared at that mess for a few seconds, considering my options. Then I closed my eyes and began to carefully stroke the tip of my moribund penis. I had invested more than eight hours in this, and I wasn’t ready to stand down without putting up a fight. I wanted my reward.
Invoking a spinning carousel of hundreds of porn scenes in my head, I managed to get half an erection out of that blob that my penis had turned into, and at last ejaculated into the toilet bowl.
After gently cleaning up my penis with a shaking hand, I sat back on the toilet, elbows on my knees, holding my head with both hands, staring into the bottom of the sink in front of me.
And there, lost in my thoughts, I stayed for a while.
I come back from the toilet at 3:54 a.m., and spend the next hour on a desperate Google spree. “Broken penis”, “Penile edema”. I go to bed with more questions than answers, terrified of having crossed a line of no return, picturing hospital procedures and awkward explanations, but with a vague hope that, perhaps, I’ll wake up from this nightmare with a healed penis and a second chance to make things better.
What’s in your math folder?
Has your addiction hit rock bottom yet?
Are you irrevocably heading for it?
Hollywood's best comeback stories always start with the main character hitting rock bottom, but waiting for your addiction to fall into decline before starting to work on it is a very expensive mistake.
The moment that I describe in this post was a very traumatic experience. If your addiction hasn’t hit rock bottom like that yet, the best thing you can do is begin working on your issues with porn now before things escalate. And, if you’ve been there already, I hope that you can find a way to forgive yourself and repair the damage, so that you can move forward in your recovery.
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.
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Hi, this is James! Thank you for reading!
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