Long read, juicier stuff is towards the end. But I hope some of you can at least read from start to finish.   In sixth grade, so around the age of 11, I first stumbled upon pornography. I must have typed “boobs” or “naked girls” or something simple like that into Safari on my Ipod Touch, but eventually this led me to full videos of people having sex. I will never forget the first time I saw a man cum in a porn video. At that point in my life, I had not had an ejaculation yet, so I really didn’t know much about it other than its how a man passes on his sperm to a woman When I first saw a man release a load onto a woman’s face, I was honestly terrified. I became overwhelmed with fear and closed out the video and did not watch videos like that again for several months, maybe even a year or longer. The video I had seen was rather hardcore, and I wondered why people did that shit with each other. It scared me that people did.    Over the next several months, I thought about the video quite often, but I never viewed anything beyond simple pictures of boobs and naked women. As I began to go through puberty and sexually mature, I decided to watch those videos again, and this time I really enjoyed them. I soon discovered the pleasure of masturbation, and for years I would watch and jerk off to porn basically everyday without a second thought about it. It was pleasurable, so why not do it?   I first stumbled upon the NoFap community in my sophomore year of high school. The community seemed to hold that by not watching porn and retaining your semen that you would gain some sort of superpowers, those powers being increased confidence, increased attractiveness, more “alpha”, more energy, more focus, less brain fog, and so on. To my 15-16 year old self at the time, it seemed like the perfect thing since I wanted to have more confidence and be more attractive to women (I felt terrible about my looks and was depressed as shit at the time).    The inner turmoil increased as I could not keep a streak longer than 14-18 days. Every time I would get about 2 weeks into a streak, the desire to ejaculate become so strong that literally I could not think about anything else. If somehow I managed to keep a streak longer than 2 weeks, I usually would have a nocturnal emission, which would make me feel bad about myself, making me think I would lose all my NoFap benefits. It even made me dabble into Lucid dreaming so that I could become lucid in my dreams and prevent a wet dream, and thus keep my NoFap benefits. It didn’t work.    I would hear people doing 90 days of NoFap, some people even a year or longer and I felt so terrible about myself that I could never go longer than 2 weeks. I labeled myself an addict, I had such a strong desire to go on this long NoFap streak and I had visions of becoming this beautiful handsome strong masculine man that women flocked to, but I always believed I could never be that because I was an addict and couldn’t retain my seed, that I would never have the discipline or self control to actualize that vision.    Around the time of high school graduation, maybe a few months before, I made a clear distinction between porn and masturbation. I found a community less gung-ho than NoFap that did not demonize masturbation/orgasm, but viewed porn as the sole enemy. Still, I had the same problems, I could not stop viewing porn, which continued to make me feel bad about myself. I continued to think I was just a hopeless addict.    Keep in mind that at the time of high school graduation, I felt like I had a major chip on my shoulder in that I was still a virgin. A number of my friends had lost their virginities but I was still a virgin, and I felt bad about myself for that, maybe I even felt less of a “man”. I was also jealous of some of my friends who were leaving home after high school and going off to 4-year universities, where they would have so much more freedom than I, who was staying at home and going to the local community college for the next 2 years.    In my first semester of community college, I tried hard to meet women, I made it a priority to have sex and prove myself a capable, masculine man. I met an attractive girl who I went on a couple dates with, but I ultimately botched it and nothing ever came of it. Then covid hit and this made me miserable because I knew I would not be hanging with any girls soon. I was quite literally an involuntary celibate at this point.    The narrative I told myself continued. I was an addict. I wasn’t attractive. I can never be fully happy because I am addict. If only I could stop watching porn maybe I could achieve the things I want in life. I berated myself for not being disciplined, for having no self-control. I further and further lost trust in myself and my abilities.    The continued existence of this narrative is even more noteworthy considering in these 2 years at community college I was undergoing powerful spiritual awakenings with both psychedelics and meditation. I became conscious of the illusory nature of the ego and was becoming aware of all its mechanisms it employs to persist, survive, and thrive. I knew the narrative I was telling myself about my porn addiction and state of being a virgin were ultimately illusory and could be dropped and/or changed with enough practice, but I was simply too attached to the narrative that I continued to tell myself the same things.    The narrative took a radical shift once I completed community college and left home to attend another university. I moved in a couple months before the school year began for the purpose of meetings lots and lots of women, and losing my v-card. In just a 2-month period, I went on dates with 8 or 9 different girls and had sex with 5 of them. I proved myself capable, I no longer berated myself for being a virgin or thinking I was incapable. For the first time in my life, I really saw myself as attractive, capable, and confident. I can thank spirituality in a large part for my success in this time period. I had greater goals in life, at the deepest level I wanted to, and still do, seek to pursue and spread Truth/Love within humanity (My goals careerwise are to become a therapist/life-coach and write Spiritual/Unitive fiction)...but anyways I viewed this overcoming of my sexual inadequacies as just a step in the path. To put into a spiral dynamics perspective, it was integrating the lower stages.    A couple months later I entered into a relationship with my current gf (we’ve been together almost a year now). When I entered this relationship, I really wanted to stop watching porn once and for all. I felt that I owed it to her not watch porn in the relationship. And I did stay away, for awhile. And even though my woman is beautiful and I enjoy our sex very much, I eventually started watching porn again, and I fucking berated myself for it. The same narrative of me calling myself an addict again came up, and once again I felt terrible about myself. I believed that if I could not stop watching porn then I would never be disciplined or self-controlled enough to do the things I want to do in life. I told my gf about my addiction and she said I have her full support and she is willing to help me in any way she can regarding the addiction.    I told her about my relapses for awhile, it was always hard confessing because she is a very sensitive and emotional person (cries like everyday multiple times) and usually she would cry and get sad, making the whole situation even more sad and making me feel like even more shit because I was letting her down on top of letting myself down. I decided to stop telling her about my relapses because it was honestly just too much.    In the past few months I have continued to watch porn but as I have progressed further and further on my spiritual path, the love for porn/sex/women has become increasingly metaphysical. The narrative of being an addict (although I watch it regularly) has gradually been dropping away. I’ve honestly just gotten exhausted of feeling terrible about my porn use. I’ve meditated, aware of as many sensations as I can be, many times from start to finish during a porn session. Automatically, out of nowhere, I tell myself I should not be doing this, that I’m weak for watching women on a screen, that I’m letting my gf down, that I’m letting myself down, but now I just kind of laugh at this conditioned response my ego has. It’s all just a narrative, all just a story I tell myself, a story I’ve clung to strongly for years. This narrative I’ve believed has prevented me from being fully happy for years, this narrative has put me into a prison.    The reality is that sex is so fucking beautiful. There is no denying that. Sex is one of the most, if not the most beautiful thing in the universe. It’s creation. What could possibly be more beautiful than that? Of course I love watching porn lol. No matter where this journey of life takes me I must never deny the profound beauty of women and sex. Recently I’ve found myself tearing up at the beauty of women and the act of sex. I’ve been noticing in my porn viewing lately that I’m much less fixated on the sexual body parts of women (tits, ass, etc…still love that don’t get me wrong), but what I’m fixated on, and rather obsessed with lately is the metaphysics of sex. Man entering woman, penis entering vagina, is so shockingly beautiful that it makes me tear up at times. It’s opposites coming together, two becoming one, yin and yang, dual becoming non-dual. THIS IS AN ART FORM OF THE SPIRITUAL PATH I AM ON AND IT IS SO FUCKING BEAUTIFUL. Two becoming one. It’s self and other merging. It doesn’t get more beautiful than this. This whole life we’re in is a love game with the universe, a divine orgy, and the less identified we are with ego the more we can see it. It literally makes me tear up, when I watch porn sometimes. I marvel at the beauty. It is the greatest thing ever. I don’t know how I could ever give this shit up honestly.    I oscillate now between being identified with the narrative and wanting to stop, and not caring at all. I do watch porn less now, and my preferences have changed a lot. I don’t care for that stepbro stepmom, industry porn terrible acting shit. Sometimes I will watch that crap out of habit and regret afterwards because I’m totally unsatisfied. I typically only watch amateur couples now, the sex feels much more raw and closer to true divine union.    There is still a part of me that wonders if I could gain a lot of benefits from a long abstinence from PMO, I haven’t seriously attempted a long streak form orgasm in over a couple years but I feel like the same shit would just happen again at the 2 week mark where I become overwhelmed and need to fucking cum (I’ve always had very high sex drive). Guess the only way to find out is through direct experience, but at the end of the day I too still have a strong fixation on PMO and it would be hard for me to even go a few days without sex.    At the end of the day I know I have work to do, healing to do, and to be honest I don’t know how the fuck I’ll do it really. I still want to be more disciplined and have more self-control in life, but I have found freedom in being less identified with the narrative of being an addict. I have become increasingly attuned and aware and shocked by the beauty of the metaphysics of sex, and I know at this point I could not give up something I love so much.    I sort of just felt like writing this on a whim, I’ll prob share on Actualized.org and see if anyone reads it and what they have to do say.