it didn't occur to me until a few days ago that I might have a porn addiction. I have known that I have a problem for a while, even gone so far as to ask my friends to hold me accountable, letting them keep the password for my media restrictions. Growing up in church environment that was saturated with warnings against pornography, I never really even entertained the idea that I could end up like the cautionary tales I heard week in and week out. I've never struggled with "lust" as a "sin", and I never saw the appeal of watching videos of people have sex or jerk off. However, I've always been a reader. I drown myself in fiction. I sink into it, and the world around me disappears. In middle school, I started reading fanfiction. I stayed away from the dirty stuff pretty successfully, having internalised the Church's judgement against that kind of stuff. It's not like I really even understood sexual desires at the time, so it was no real hardship to stick to PG content. As I got older, of course, that changed. Reading smutty fanfiction became a temptation I intermittently failed at resisting. My arrival at college changed a lot of things, though. I was no longer immersed in a culture that told me masturbation and sexual desire should be repressed. I was being told it was normal, healthy even. I got more comfortable with the idea of indulging in explicit works. Somewhere along the way, I found myself aching for the chances to return to my room, to hole up and read. At every opportunity for leisure, I drowned myself. Then I went abroad, and I had a really rough time. I isolated, and I retreated from my social circles, and I was bombarded with feelings of anxiety and depression that I had never experienced before. For whatever reason, checking out of reality felt safest. I began showing up late to gatherings, falling behind on my responsibilities. Nothing felt appealing except for reading. Waking up, falling asleep, walking to and from class, my day was bookended and punctuated and suffocated in fantasy and smut. After the semester ended and I returned home, I committed to abstaining from it all. I reprioritized, recommitted myself to my school work and extracuricculars.  I kept busy. When I felt like that wasn't enough, I locked my devices and handed over the keys to my friend. For about 2 or 3 weeks there, my life was fanfiction free. It was fine. I didn't think about it too much. Then, I found a loophole on my computer. That was about 5 months ago. Since then, and because current circumstances (re:COVID) have cleared my schedule and allowed me to isolate, I find myself unable to do anything productive. I masturbate routinely, and more than is probably healthy. I alternate between reading innocent, fluffy tales and getting off to content that I never thought I would be okay consuming. The sexual fix feeds off of the comfort of fictional intimacy and romantic fulfilment. I've wanted to stop so many times, but until recently, the desire to get off to smut has persisted. However, in the past few days, I've not really even wanted to read porn (it's not like there's anything new in the next story, I've started feeling disgusting about it), but I do it anyways. And I realized there's a label- a concrete label that exists in reality- for this problem that I've been wrestling with for years now: pornography addiction. So, I did a cursory google search to look at the symptoms, casually curious. The symptoms describe my current lifestyle. It's not a devastating realization. The cycle of guilt, regret, desire to change, failure, relapse has numbed me to my addiction. One of the articles I found had a link to this website. I thought I might find something here. I don't want to ruin sex for myself. I don't want to be unhealthy. I don't want to look back at my college years only to see a void of lost time and days spent drowning. I want to seize my life, be accomplished, to find real sexual and romantic fulfilment..... Sorry this is so long, it just feels like I need to tell the whole thing. If you've read this far, tell me if you've found a reason to quit.