... but I feel like I need to let some steam out. Just some background: I'm 16 years old and I've been PMOing almost every day for nearly 4 years. So I have never had a girlfriend, never had sex, and as I recently moved to a new school, I don't have that many friends as well. To be honest, it makes me kind of jealous and depressed to see everyone else enjoying their social life. For as long as I can remember, I've always been really shy — it's just something that defines who I am. Yo could say that I have social anxiety. It's a problem that I realized that I've had for many years, and I'm trying to become more extroverted, which I'm not seeing a lot of progress on. It's hard for me to make new friends. It's hard for me to talk to girls. I'm doing pretty well academically, but I still lack a social life. I don't know how to hold a casual conversation without feeling awkward. I don't know how to display positive body language. And honestly... I'm scared. ... scared that I'll never lose my virginity, scared that I'll always be shy, scared that I can never experience the level of intimacy that others do. I'm just posting because I think that it might make me feel more relieved. I'm trying out the 90 day challenge, and I don't know if it'll change much. Anyways, that's my story.
You've got your whole life ahead of you. Of course the present situation is what counts the most. I did the same at your age! I remember that at age 16 I went for a short internship and during the first days I was hardly able to eat in the canteen because my hands were shaking so much. Both happened to me at age 22, and, looking back, this was early enough. Right now I've been single for more than two years and it doesn't really matter to me. Because it's not about being in a relationship, but about the human being who you are in a relationship with. May be that's a chance to improve your social skills. Or, in case you are suffering from your body's reactions in social environments (shaking hands, cold sweat), learn how to calm down. If you can't make friends at school, you could consider making them elsewhere. Whatever happens: Relax. That's the most important thing. It's okay if you aren't content with your present situation. But really, you're still young, and within the next 10 years there could happen a lot. I'm 10 years older than you and I also suffered from social anxiety. I still do a little, but it's under control, and I have found my inner peace. Only yesterday I got told that my sole presence, without myself talking much, makes people feel deeply relaxed on the inside. As an introverted person, you can obtain a great passive energy. Keep working on yourself. Coming to this site is a great step in committing to doing so! Only quitting PMO won't change your life all on its own, but it helps setting the conditions for becoming active and doing what you believe in. Wish you a lot of success!
I suggest that you purchase a dating/seduction program called THE TAO OF BADASS. It is worth every penny of your investment. Buy it and spend the next year of your life studying the shit out of everything on there. The program is completely comprehensive in ALL aspects of meeting and seducing women, from body language, to masculine and feminine gender roles, and a lot more. If you are willing to put in the time to learn that program and most of all APPLY what you learn whenever you can, I promise your life will improve far beyond anything that you thought possible.
Hi there, I, heartily endorse most of what Headspace is saying to you. Here's my spin, because at your age I don't think you can hear it too many times, and the more diverse the perspectives the more likely one of them you can connect to. I myself am 21 years older than you, but still remember all the feelings you are talking about. I never had to move to a new town to feel that lonely though. I always did anyway. I may have been in a slightly better place with friends, but I never took chances with girls and was convinced that I would never have a girlfriend or sex. I had various very religious phases in and out of a generally pedestrian religious life, so I convinced myself most of the time that I didn't need pre-marital sex anyway. But that just made me want to get married - I wanted to get married when I was 14 years old! My whole life has been a gradual and persistent attenuation of that desire. Anyway, that's where I was. Looking back I am sure of a few things, some of which may help your perspective: 1. At your age, we are obsessed with these things as if they are super important and I don't see anyway to convince a 16 year old they are not. They feel SO daunting, heavy and profound. I've imagined many times many different "Quantum Leap"-esque (look it up) situations where I could go back. The best way to go back, of course is to go back keeping your knowledge and perspective. I would know it's not important. I would flirt back to Marguarite, probably successfully, but always remembering that later in life she kind of goes crazy. I would go out of my way to try to befriend the one kid that actually got sorta famous from our high school, maybe by experimenting with my sexuality. And of course I'd figure out a way to meet Samuel Beckett, John Cage, Frank Zappa and Spalding Gray before they died, run away from home in time to try to convince Kurt Cobain to not kill himself, and come up with a master plan to stop the 2 major catastrophes of the begining of the next century. But in the swiss-cheese-brain scenario where I only know intellectually I'm taking everything waaay too seriously, but I can't stop the adolescent feeling of everything being so heavy and important, and can't stop the close-to-crippling shyness I would try to make that heaviness and that shyness be the thing that makes ME important. My experiences as something to help future generations or feed into a special literary existence or some master plan of non-violent long-term vengeance that takes 15 years to complete. 1.a.) also if it at all possible, you might have very high standards which need to be lowered as far as girls are concerned. This is hard at your age, but I think it's easier these days that it was back in the 90s AND I know that as I got older I realized that ladies of every shape and size are delicious in their own unique ways - and faces clear up eventually - and adolescence is cruelest to those who come out looking the best . . . . 2. But the truth is, none of the people I went to high school with, even the few I do honestly wish still did, mean ANYTHING to me and my life for the past 15 years. I could have walked around the school naked 4 times a year, I could have had my dick sucked by the closet gay kids, and it would have no effect on me or my life, because those people mean SO little. Loans I took out in 2006 have 1000 times the effect on me that the aggregate of everything that has happened to me in 4 years of high school have had. I'm not even jealous of the sorta famous guy that went there. If you can possess this perspective then you have a power your fellow students can never have. If you CAN, then use your high school time as a personal experiment. Where you are not the victim of your surroundings, but your surroundings are your laboratory. Be the weirdo on purpose, play the numbers games with girls or friends, befriend everyone and don't worry about those who don't befriend back. Ask out every girl in order of how attractive you think they are until one or more says yes. Be brutally honest with everyone, because they don't matter. 3. Despite the above 2 things, loneliness is still a potential problem, although frankly with number 2, it probably won't be, but lets say it is. Unlike me at your age, you live in the time and land of social media and anonymous identities - they aren't the best, but they aren't the worst ways to combat loneliness, there are whole communities of people in the wwworld that can do everything from be your friend to satisfy you sexually - it might be a bit of a numbers game in that too, but . . . . there is even a community of ASEXUAL people support group - not that you are, just - there's everything and anything out there to glom on to.. . . to at least delay or attenuate the loneliness 4. You say your grades are good, and you are 16 - that means college is coming. Socially, college is INEFFABLY so much better than high school. Holy Shit! - I mean don't get unrealistic about your expectations to the point that it's a let down. And don't get me wrong - I had three not so great relationships in college, one horrible one that actually sent me to jail for a night, and a lot of crushes and unrequited love and loneliness and bad stuff, but I actually finally had girlfriends and I had my first kiss and lost my virginity my freshman year. But seriously - at the very least wait for college - at the very most, do the number 2 plan at college. Lastly, regarding Iroquois recommendation, The Tao of the Badass and other "programs" like it need to be taken with a grain of salt - it can definitely help you with your confidence and perspective, and in that way I do wish I had something like that at your age, but the main way it does it is to paint women as "lesser than" and easy to manipulate conquests, and if you follow that stuff fully and to the letter it just makes you a real asshole, and as time goes by, the kind of women you want to be with, of all ages, are wising up to those "tricks" more and more. You don't NEED it to be successful with women, but it would help you treat women like pieces of meat or beings whose mission is only to serve you. It could most certainly bring you a lot of ditzes that are convinced they need to stifle their own intelligence. But you can totally find a meaningful relationship in your life, with an intelligent, strong, and real woman without it completely. my 2 cents
Dude, a lot of us here have a good 16 years on you! I didn't even discover nofap or the damage that porn was having on my until like two years ago. You found this community at 16! You are so progressive for your age. I'm a shy person myself and have social anxiety. It's way easier to get over a problem when you're younger than to put it off. Fear is nothing. It steals your time and your energy. It makes you complacent. Get over the fucking fear, man! Or before you know it, you'll be 30 something and have the maturity of someone that's 16 in this area of your life and it will be some much harder. You will have so much more pride to overcome. Dance, even if you look stupid or feel stupid at first. For some reason, a lot of women think it's sexy. Touch women on their arms for sec gently while making a point. When you meet them, shake their hand longer than normal and look straight into their eyes and smile. Touch is a missing ingredient for most guys with their interactions with women. Make excuses to touch them in socially acceptable places like: forearms, shoulders. "You've got like no hair on your arms! You're like one of those hairless cats! (*caress arm while smiling and look for her reaction*) Yep, silky smooth." Get over your need to feel and look smart. You obviously care about your studies and ARE smart. Act like a fucking kid dammit! Develop those fun muscles. Say stupid random shit to people like, "ice cream popcorn tits" and see what their reaction is. If they're cool and fun, they'll laugh and want to be your friend. Also, sharing things about yourself with friends or romantic interests is a good way to break ice. Like, "I don't know about you, but I grew up in this town. I have a love/hate relationship with it." Then give the other person an opportunity to grab onto that. Notice the "I don't know about you". It implies that you want to know about them without the pressure of directly asking. It's the power of offering yourself up, giving information. Picture that the person is like facebook. You have to fill in all of the fields for them. Interests, beliefs, music, movies, books, etc. Only you do it very small bits at a time so that they give you little bits back. And you talk at length about the little bits. Milk it for all it's worth if the person is interested in the topic. Try to think how the topic can be spoken about in past, present and future tense. Also, think about how the topic can be discussed in fantasy nonsense land. Some people are out there all of the time and they can be fun to talk to. You might have noticed this with some people, his they'll say weird shit that doesn't seem to relate to the topic at all. I have a friend that, for some reason, we end up relating every single topic back to how the "illuminati" must have a hand in it and that Steve Jobs was an Illuminatus and that he's actually still alive on an island with Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain. Just reiterating this: be a kid! It can be fun as hell if you let it, then take that fun with you into your adulthood. Lastly, check out Hayley Quinn on YouTube. She's take "pick up" and makes it ethical. She has tons of free advice on YouTube.
Hey man, thanks so much. There's so much truth in your words. I thought about it for a while, and realized that "being a kid" is exactly the problem. Back when I was younger, I would get along with people just fine. I was able to make new friends here and there, get along with women, and naturally incorporate touch in my interactions. It wasn't until I started growing up and becoming more "mature" that I started filtering out my words and actions and dared less to step out of my comfort zone. From now on, I'll try my best to be that careless kid who looked at the world with curiosity and adventure. It sounds kind of counter-intuitive — you're trying to become younger as you get older, but it's something I realized that I must do in-order to become more social.
I'm glad that my words resonated with you. What you said about maturity is totally true. In trying to keep kids from "running amok" and acting like chimps, a lot of that natural spirit that people have can be unintentionally smothered. I feel bad for parents because they're "damned if they do and damned if they don't". This reminds me of when my nephew was younger. I would take him to the playground and he would make friends instantly. No effort whatsoever, just, "Hey! Wanna be friends? You're awesome, I'm awesome! Let's have some fun." It'll be hard. I'm not going to sugar coat it for you. People won't stick around a good portion of the time. They'll agree to things and not do them. They'll disappoint you, in romance and friendship. The thing is that a lot of relationships die. They have a lifespan just like people. If you can come to terms with that and understand it like you understand that people die, you'll be better off. Some people let it get the best of them because they just can't handle that so and so doesn't want to hang out anymore. Or that the love of their life screwed them over and left. There are so many people that I used to be friends with and I thought that we would be friends forever. There is one person from high school and one person from college that I still talk to regularly. And they live in different cities. Someone once said something very wise to me. She said, "I stopped expecting so much of people a long time ago. Since then, I've been much happier and life has been easier." Living this way makes forgiveness a lot easier and makes reconnection with people possible. Seriously though, I'm super envious of you. You have your shit together. You're getting good grades, you care about at least one big social issue: porn and how it affects you and the world. In high school, I didn't give a shit about porn or how it affected people and the world. It was just another drug for me and as far as I was concerned "it was all natural". Anyway, you've got this. Always remember, that feeling that you got when you hung out with your best friend for the first time. Or that feeling that you felt when you saw that beautiful girl that you just can't forget. That came from you, not them. Sure, they were catalysts for it to take place, but that potential energy is lying in wait within you. No one can take that away from you.
