Porn Addiction ruined my brain and caused never ending trauma - male 28 yo

I am a 28 year old male living in Australia.

I have been abusing porn since 2009.

It started off as a fascination but soon took hold of my life like a drug I need.
I mainly used porn to escape reality. The dopamine spikes I was receiving from porn felt like it was super potent for me. Had I been introduced to alcohol or drugs, perhaps I would have been addicted to those instead but my drug of choice currently and for the past 15 years has been pornography and the psychosis that results from porn induced orgasms.

I recollect my high school years, I was absolutely delighted with having my own laptop and smartphone. I would spend my toilet breaks looking up porngraphy as a 15-19 year old. During my high school days, I was obsessed with using smartphones to download images and videos of people having sex. I would spend extended time just sitting in the toilets looking up porn on my phone. When I got back from school, I tend to turn the laptop away from the door - knowing how shameful it would be had I been caught in act of viewing pornography. I am 28 now, I feel a strong sense of remorse knowing I had wasted such precious time - watching porn instead of having to put those hours into being a good student.

For the longest time ever, I have known there is something wrong with me. Being social and having friends wasn't easy. I couldn't easily communicate with people. I perefered to be left alone and be with myself. I guess I was neurotic? Perhaps slightly autistic and on the spectrum of having aspergers.

Due to my own mental inhibitions, I was a highly sensitive person. I got bullied a lot and I didn't know how to stand up for myself. Standing at 5ft6 and being of a non-white background did not help my cause either. Over time, the bullying and the sense of despair drove me into deep depression - only coping strategy was to abuse porn as much as possible.

I was quite smart in my younger grades. Was seen as a bright as studious student by almost all teachers in the country I grew up in. It was only after my parents decision to move to Australia, that I had developed this sense of heightened awareness and despair - something to do with my own mental health problems and not getting timely intervention.

My father is a very religious man who's only advice to all my problems were "Pray, forgive and repent". Whilst this philosophy might have worked for him - in a different era, it certainly was an issue with me. I no longer was religious, well not as much as he would like for me to be. As a result of my new found atheism and sense of free will, I had decided to try and break out of my shell. I wanted to see if I could adjust into society as a young adventorous male - the type you see in a coming of age movie. This suddenly backfired as I was seen as a comic relief in the eyes of many. People were mean to me. They felt it was ok to walk all over me since I would offer no resistance.
My grades plummeted. I was dealing with bullying at school as a result of wanting to be a class clown. I got verbally and physically assaulted by boys who were bigger and stronger than me. These incidents had a profound affect on my sense of self-esteem which has not yet recovered since. To make matters worse, I was travelling 2 hours each way back and forth to the school since it was a prestigious one.

The situation at home was not much better either. My parents did not understand that I had new objectives: "to be normal" - the full scope of which was something even I did not truly understand. As time went on, I started losing hope. I dwelved more into the realms of various pornography genres looking for the next best high. For a time, I was even watching pornography which now would make me revolt. I was 16-17 here. My parents yelled at me. They scolded me for wasting time, for not being a good student and not being a good son. I used porn again to escape my reality.

I got my final year 12 results, my ATAR score was 56.30. This made my parents furious, they wanted me to repeat the year level. We moved houses just so that I could attend a school which was nearby. I attended a local school wherein I was doing really well at the start. I managed to get good grades. But something happened in between, a girl who I had a crush on happened to know that I was repeating the year level. I felt a sense of shame creeping in. Feeling sad and depressed, I turned to porn to cope. I used porn to escape my realities once more knowing that all is lost. I wish I could console my younger self with some wisdom. I finished the year level with a slightly improved score of 75.40. I did not feel any sense of accomplishment at all.

I tried enrolling into health science degree in hopes that I could live my parents dream that one day I could be a doctor in Australia. Turns out I was never cut out for long hours of focused study especially with my never ending porn addiction. I realised this and dropped out of uni in the first semester. I started working at Macdonalds and under my fathers guidance decided to work at the front counter.

The front counter worker role was something mainly young white females did. I was aware I looked different and this stressed me out further. The customers treated me poorly and I often attributed this to my meek nature. I was also bullied by my managers a few times. One manager told me to stand up for myself. I wish I had learnt valuable lessons from these work places. I worked at two different MacDonalds joints. Both experiences were bad for me. I wish I had not worked there to begin with since I only feel worse as a result of the time spent there.

Fast track to 2014, I started a degree in Engineering. I was a year older than my peers and looked perhaps even older as a result of my highly sensitive brain chemistry and experiencing trauma and abuse. I tried to do well in my engineering classes. The first semester was bad, I had failed 2 courses. I did better in the second semester. Managed to pass all my subjects and even get a few distinctions. My second year and third years were all a blur, I not only failed most of my classes - I tried to repeat what I had done in high school - to be a class clown in order to 'fit in' - only to be clowned by others and bullied by them again. My failure to stand up for myself was taxing not only on my mental health but also my grades.

Around 2017, I had decided to work full time instead of focusing on my studies. I worked as a disability support worker earning good money and diverted my attention towards money. During this time, I had also developed a habit of visiting strip clubs. Most of my expereiences with strippers have been negative with a handful being somewhat reasonable. In 2018, I had paid an escort to take my virginity. The experience was quite sad and something I vowed to never repeat again. I also started working as an intern at an engineeering place around this time.

I realised during my internship that the workload was intense and I could not cope with it. So I had worked in the weekends to earn more money as a support worker. Whilst travelling 4 hours to get to work as an intern and then working on the weekends as a disability support worker - I only used porn to numb my brain. I kept telling myself that everything will work out in the end but the truth is, its hard to keep up to date with all the information overload especially when you are in a serious role such as being an engineering intern. Thankfully, the line manager was a kind man who kept me around for as long as I could even though he had raised his own concerns about my performance. Around mid 2019 I quit my job at the engineering place as a result of being in a car accident. I worked day and night at the disability centre in hopes of making enough money to buy a house.

In early 2020, I got referred to a job at an engineering place. It was high paying around 45$ per hour. Things were going well until I started to work from home during the pandemic lockdowns - which were pretty hardcore in my city. I had gone to a strip club to celebrate the occasion with my friend who had referred me for the role. The strip club experience was also quite horrible in that I vowed to never see another stripper as long as I live (i broke this promise to myself in 2022).

As a result of work from home arrangements, I failed attending to my work and used pornography to cope with my stressors. I wish I had somewhat learnt to emotionally regulate myself but at 25 I was still struggling to come to grips with my personal problems. Having used porn to cope only led to my performance decreasing and I was promptly let gone in June 2020. This took a blow on my self-esteem. I went back into the disability sector and went back to the 40-50 hour work week grind. Over time, my experience at the work sites made me aware of the fact that I was unable to care for people especially those who were of a bigger stature to me. I also did not want to be a carer for the rest of my life. So I enrolled at a coding bootcamp in November 2020 that cost me $12,000. The bootcamp experience was truly something that opened my eyes to my inability to focus. I was unable to keep up to speed with the tasks required of me. I was copying code from other peoples github and was caught plagiarising work. I did not graduate the bootcamp having lost $12,000.

I decided to quit working as a carer in April 2021. I enrolled in a second codingbootcamp around June 2021 costing $13,000. Again, I failed to realise that my inability to control my urges to watch porn was the reason I couldnt focus on being a programmer. I somehow managed to graduate the bootcamp only because they felt pity on me. For the past 2.5 years I have been staying home, unemployed under the guise of learning coding - only to be relapsing to porn every single day. My life is a reflection of what can go wrong if you don't put an end to this addiction.

 

Yes
Unfortunately being a non white male who isn’t attractive kind of makes it harder as your dating pool isn’t that great - thereby making loneliness an even bigger problem.

Porn is an easy fix for this long term problem - I’ve seriously considered marrying a woman from another country to help ease out the pain or at least to start a family some day. But it won’t be happening by being passive and not taking action - or numbing my brain by flooding my dopamine receptors.

It’s unfortunate that I’ve been dealt with a bad hand in life but sometimes you have to deal with it