Disclaimer: This is not a essay on whether women or men are more at fault for the detachments that occur between them. Rather it is a summary of on person’s struggle and journey towards finding what can be used to bring them together. Obviously it may be repetitive and annoying, but hopefully it can resonate with people who feel like they are alone in this world and just watch the people with the apparent confidence to share their life enjoy what they cannot.

One element of advice from a man who received more attention than he deserved from women to the anyone who decides to listen: Initiate Conversation with those you subconsciously believe as less than you. This will take practice and experience to learn, but normally if you find something uninteresting or boring, you have a prime opportunity in life to learn and grow for yourself and something else. Please take it.

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Whether or not it will serve me well to do this, I am in a state of constant argument with my own mind, morals, and morality. I could choose to walk away from these feelings and accept that the journey to overcome this would be unlikely to succeed. It is why I am writing. As most great adventures go, history will ignore the millions that died while trying. Or as Yoda says, those that do not, are ignored.

At some point in growing up in grade school I started to have overwhelming anxiety that was akin to having a flu’s nausea whenever I missed an assignment. It would be a minimal reading assignment at first or just a missed practice, but would evolve to not showing up for presentations of group projects. Prior to having the internet, a child’s mind had books and old movies to play out and reflect their imaginations. How it was passed to me, I cannot say as I have no recollection of any mention of sex while growing up, but at some point the concept of sex grew out of these mediums. By about 2/3 grade I had somehow discovered what sex was and was given detention by making fun of a girl at school about her wanting to have sex along with another kid. 

Natural bodily functions were functional, necessary, but a bane to existence, I would have issues that had been recurring since I was young. One of my first recollections is having been unable to control myself in the main area of the house and trying to clean shit up myself at around 5 years old. After that, I know I had trouble controlling myself while sleeping. I would either have night terrors and sleep walk, wake up screaming, or else wake up having peed, shit, or vomitted on myself. Well into my elementary school years, my my mother kept a walkie talkie in my room and once caused her to break a toe trying to stop me from doing one of those acts in the middle of the night and went to the hospital. Gloriously these reactions happened at restaurants, but my memory is hazier there. Nightmares where I would recall being at a family meal and not being able to interact with people and becoming very concerned that I would never be able to communicate with anyone. At times this manifested by being at school with a fever and convincing my teachers that any feverish symptoms were due to playing outside.

So welcome to the show. You’ve got the hook. It’s terribly baited. What sexual being would choose something destined to be ignored, pitied, and rejected. One that is logical.

A word of note, the majority of those memories are of a selfish being. A being so mentally incapable of understanding of the outside world that my family’s burden maintaining that kind of child is rarely considered in my head. I was even fascinated by a TV show where a woman was demonstrating methods the mafia used to kill people which stuck in my mind. She would not die, but my thoughts would begin to wonder how to solve those frustrating childish problems.

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First section isn’t really abuse as the term is commonly understood. While I do believe that physical and sexual abuse are way worse, the action to accept that I was helps me see that others are too and to not act out in reaction if they act in a negative way to me. Mind you it’s taken me 28 years to see this with countless male friends, but admittedly few or one directional female friends spending time with me. This may be identified earlier if the friendships at a younger age are stronger, long lasting, and deeply emotional. In my circumstance it was not.

To not make this a self hating essay, I have to give credit that I made my own friendships for the most part. The concept of parents molding a child’s social circle was ambiguous to me, as mostly is the case for all abusive households. If the parent is struggling there is a good chance that struggle will be passed on to the kid. For the most part I was able to create a world to be successful in. But taking a small sliver of wisdom from Thomas Jefferson (given his own failings at following his own advice): continuously refresh that world. He believed a constitution should be rewritten every 20 years, and a person has much more freedom of movement to accomplish that much more regularly.

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Avoidance that resulted in long term thoughts and pain started in 4th grade. A girl made it clear she was interested in me during a school game and for now all I recall is that I froze up and could not respond to her. A friend pulled me aside to offer a child’s advice, but it didn’t help. Given I had had other instances of severe anxiety induced by a fear of missing out, it’s not surprising it stuck. But it is blatant how often that repeated itself. People would try to socialize with me on bus rides and I would have none of it. When my guy friends would be attempting to flirt with girls I would make a fool of myself and ruin the sense of secrecy that they were trying to convey. In addition, I would be too friendly around my friends girlfriends. Developing inside jokes about my friends with the girls. Both instances made me an outsider in most intimacy discussions at that stage.

You get the point. Awkward, painfully shy, obnoxiously self centered and not willing to play by the rules, ignoring the fact that the rules were unknown. So to spice that ignorance up: I started to look at photos of naked women on workplace supplied computers where my mother taught. Obviously as any kid would, I had found other mechanisms using catalogs and yearbooks, but that was my first excursion into acting a way that could harm others. I was a loner and loser so making use of my sisters old barbies and dressed them up in “revealing” versions of their clothing to replicate the images I found online when I couldn’t be online was not irrational at the time. Of course I then used my small savings to purchase a PSP knowing it had internet capabilities and from them on only used my mother’s laptop when I needed escalation. Around this time I developed fantasies in my head of dying and the people at school being sad for that happening.

Escalation is the natural entropy of a young guy and trading sleep for more sexual release was a natural tradeoff in my life. I did learn some interesting skills around this time with respect to learning how to down videos and photos and spent hours solving problems that were not even solvable at the time. I was able to skate by school with lucky amount of intelligence and memory that worked in my favor to passing classes that I spent no time on understanding. I would always wait until I was completely satiated to start work, and working by flashlight. This time was heavy with categorizing photos in various structures which was a weird hobby I also had growing up with toys. I inevitably evolved into reading erotic text stories that I found and would spend hours reading trading in my previous passion for reading in general. A concern with the written language that I didn’t realize then, but the imagination with words can be much more elaborate and subversive in daily situations for me. I would catch myself daydreaming at school about the written stories, while I previously had only thought of the photos I had seen online.

Avoiding social situations began at this time. I would go to family reunions or hang out with friends and be distinctly bored by the whole interaction. Wanting to go and do what I would normally do alone and not be able to do so. I would dehydrate myself and choose fantasy over engaging with friends while on trips with them. It started my habit of masturbating in the company of others, but attempting to do so without being noticed became a recurring hobby through college. An inability to have close friendships developed and I would move into different circles in school, with struggles, to begin associating with “smarter” children. This led to a detachment from previous friendships and an evolution to becoming someone who held birthday parties people would rarely attend and at one time, only 1 person did so. My habit of avoiding social situations began by avoiding the 8th grade dance. A girl did comment on it, but I let it just leave my mind as a lie at the time. I then attended a an 8th grade graduation, but shit my pants and stayed at the party while trying to clean up intermittently. I am very confident that I did not pull that off and I never really saw those people again.

Over the next couple years, I would do poorly on class work that required effort rather than just smarts and I started the process of no longer practicing musical instruments. My trumpet was first as I felt that I would impede my TV time and my parents would not appreciate me playing it when they got home. This was also the time my sister and I started to interact as my parents: we would have huge fights and then go watch TV in separate rooms all day. I also started to develop performance anxiety and could never play solos in front of large crowds.

Up until this point, I had been stealing all of my internet connection from our neighbors growing up. But around middle of high school we ended up getting internet. I used some past research to download tools and convert videos and images into more portable formats and continued to expand the amount of photos and videos I saw. I would also start reading not just violent, but kidnap and torture focused stories as well as full on death/murder and found stories with women of questionable ages along with beginning to fund a lot of fascination with Dexter and Criminal Minds.

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High school gave me more opportunities to both engage socially and then avoid social interaction. Numerous people would try to talk to me, but feeling myself a mixture of unworthy and unlike them inspired a lack of work towards becoming social. High school girls gave me the nickname “failure” at some point due to my performance anxiety. While I went to one homecoming, I avoided the rest and only socialized during school sponsored activities and a few times hung out with friends. A girl talked to me on the bus and I just ranted about something until she no longer wished to talk to me. She also reached out to me at one point and asked if I believed a human brain could think itself into a sickness. To which I chose not to respond besides stating that if it was true, then the opposite had to be also true. Women would openly express a desire to be friends and spend time with me, and I would either pretend not to notice or shut it down if I did not like them sexually.

One person had the determination to make something happen with me instead of just hanging out as part of a friend group. She directly asked me why I hugged another girl and not her and started to hug me. I would respond with asking her to hang out while we avoided doing work in band and even hugging her in front of other people when she “accidentally” put herself close to me. She then put her shaved legs on mine on a bus ride and also cuddled on another. Both times I either was too concerned with stomach issues causing me to relive the anxiety of childhood stomach issues. She helped escalate our interactions, but the anxiety and jealousy of her other male friends and other facts of her social abilities ultimately led me to finding yet more solace in porn as I ran away from her. 

This was not an isolated incident in my fantasies/memories. One girl “accidentally” sat on my arm which was resting on the table while she read something on a wall. I could have asked her to move or shift or say something and instead I just sat still and acted indifferent. Someone even called me out while playing poker (at which I easily lost) and told me that I only played with a good hand. Another time I did the same thing I did in 4th grade and avoided attempting to spend time with someone in fear that she would cut my balls off and I stuck to that viewpoint given many opportunities to modify my actions 

I would decide to double down on written stories about women of uncertain age involved in asphyxia scenarios, torture and electric shock scenarios, as well as death. I would not find this much of an opportunity to change myself until college, and instead I existed in a state of boredom and uncertainty. Unsure of what I was feeling and unwilling to feel it. I did have a reputation for going to friends houses to play video games and playing cheaply without building up any other skills. Admittedly I did not spend time practicing so they had validity to that statement. At the end of high school the only time I took to drink was with my mother when she allowed me to share a sherry my sister had actually received for her graduation. Even then though, I would drink to get drunk. I explicitly recall my mother having to tell me to stop and not keep drinking.

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Social anxiety and alcohol at college gave me the opportunity to act with freedom from my past isolation. But the missed opportunities kept occurring. On targeted me within a group of random people I helped coordinate and I went after her, a first time for me. We hung out, but when I decided to act on it, she would push back often and didn’t seem to notice that she did get me off, and then did again but made it clear it was not something she enjoyed. Ended up ghosting her just because I couldn’t stay interested in her physically or mentally. Danced with others at a party, but could only do so when blacked out. Otherwise I would never talk to anyone and would only be creepy, by trying to dance with people without talking and touching them without asking.

During this time, my drinking escalated to the point where I worked during the week to drink. In addition, I would take any opportunity on offer to smoke and drink any day of the week and took pride in surviving as well as I did while doing so. Though my grades did begin to drop, my weekly blackouts were not seen by me to be a major concern. I would take liberties in vomiting and forcing people to take care of me on regular occasions following significant binges. Once locking myself out of my dorm, and even more often requiring a clean up process the next day.

This did modify as I went into my second year in college. I would explicitly try to avoid socializing as often, but another issue started where I would begin to budget my efforts and binge more dramatically and had to be taken care of by my new roommates that were not my friends. A key instance was when I was drinking with people after a tough week and while I walked myself home (which I did so often in blackout situations) I ended up waking up a block from my dorm with paramedics taking care of me. I managed to talk them into letting me go home, but this was my first instance of losing all logic after drinking and I was lucky not to get fined as I had messed up an establishment outside of my room.

Porn increased this year as socializing decreased, and I quickly escalated through my previous porn elements and realized I was better off with written material as the videos were not fulfilling what I sought (it was also quieter in the company of others). My search terms went to a much more extreme level and I would spend hours reading and fantasizing while avoid social situations. I also would fantasize while hungover, and with my roommate present. I began to use these processes to get myself to both wakeup and sleep, especially after my times drinking. I would blend visual, written, and moving representations of all the activities that I wanted to blend into an event in my world and exist in that state for hours.

Early in third year I must have felt accomplished after an internship and learning that I could handle a tipsy drive. I went hard into one of the first football games of the season, overdosed on alcohol, and ended up at the hospital. I did discharge myself and met up with a school administrator, but again did not consider a stop to my drinking. I again kept focused on reducing these episodes. But I built confidence to then work very hard during the week, but party recklessly. I also had instances where I would mistake rooms in group retreats and made a fool of myself by going into the wrong beds while blackout or require people to care for me while blackout.

My friends decided to set me up with his girlfriends friend and instead of staying cool headed and try to make a friendship at the least, I got drunk to the point that I left the party and walked 2 miles before I was lucky to hitchhike safely. My final year, my drinking stayed roughly the same and while I did go to jail and failed to manage my drinking at all. However, what I did notice is that once graduation happened I felt a lot more bereft of what the next part of life would bring. It felt numb and without hope. My drinking excursions diminished, but they did not ever stop, nor did I think they should. I would come home from work parties and vomit in my room. Drive drunk after some as well. And it didn’t cross my mind that was a problem. Paranoia began after a bad trip, and most other social anxieties again occurred.

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At this stage I again lose a bit of the timeline and I know what I would do for porn would amount to edging for hours without letting myself finish. While it had started in school, it came to the primary focus after school. It would allow me to spend hours on my own and get work done, but also manage my emotions during that time. I began to start to use dating apps, but was predictably unsuccessfully. Certain “lucky” situations occurred, which were recreations of high school, but more obviously sexual. 
One grad reunion night, I went home after a party and must have believed I was home so I stripped naked to sleep cooler and avoid night terrors. A friend came down and she told me that she was hungry. Instead of being able to think through what she meant, I grabbed my phone and in a black out tried to order her some food. Another woman I met online did relate to me by being online a lot, but I freaked out when she discussed shock therapy for depression and I could never touch her. I did nothing as she had previously made it clear she had been sexually assaulted at parties.

I did end up spending time in a friends town that I went to college with, but when the night got later, we both just got blackout. I groped, but did not progress past when I stopped hearing her moaning, but it was concerning to me, that I do recall it even though it was such a foggy night in general. I do recall that later that night I mistook a closet for a bathroom and had to clean that up in the middle of the night. Similar bathroom problems also occurred while staying with other friends later that year. 

Drinking and being confused kept happening and I would end up in my previous apartments trying to reason with the new residents about where I was supposed to be. I also returned to old AirBNBs and would attempt to break in while blackout. While at festivals and with friends I would choose to take certain days off, but I also began to experience some serious digestive concerns as well while eating and drinking too aggressively. I had a habit of vomiting in hotel rooms or in airbnbs with the frequency of my college days. Experiments of drinking and taking edibles alone just to relax by myself became commonplace. This was enjoyable, but became an emotional roller coaster and I ended up texting people from work multiple times during these situations. Socially I would get kicked out of restaurants because I could not hold myself together or lose my ID and phone while out with people. The expenses, time, worry, I had in recovering my phone/wallet/ID was life changing and helped me again try to cut back. Unsuccessfully.

At this time I had developed a significant habit of masturbating to a concoction of multiple different forms of porn and regularly switching between then over multiple sessions and in a single one to keep my mind from becoming stalled. ASMR porn paired it with Porn Music videos which used rave and epileptic level flashes in scenery to up and relax my sexual stimulation. I did notice that I would come home from work and use the PMV for an upper and the ASMR videos as a downer just before bed. This would help me relax and not worry about the next day. I had scenarios where I would being reading the stories that I had found on work trips and trips to see friends and would plan to read them on the plane. I would read them on trains places (as they are more separated from each other). I also made it possible to listen to these stories while I was driving and would drive home on long road trips where I would be masturbating myself while driving, but doing so in a manner that would only be edging so that I would avoid the consequences of something more serious.

Around this time I met a series of coworkers that I tried to do initiate with and I let them into my head They helped shape my understanding of trust in friends. We played tennis, went on hikes, and went skiing. They ultimately invited me to their apartment twice, I invited them to mine once, and they flaked on me once. They would make references to their “pet names” boyfriends had and were calling them, and other emotional bids. When I recall telling them about listening to ASMR, I do recall my other coworkers “coincidentally” bringing it up the next day. Hours on the phone and at dinners with just talking about life in general and solving problems for work well into the night as well as sharing book recommendations. They argued with me and talked to me about work in ways I only now realized they had little care for. They let their guard down near me at work, not harassing, but letting clothing slip and stating things with sexual connotations I have heard and decided to do nothing about. Sky diving, a concert (where I lost my mind and grinded on one of them the entire time and lost my ability to tell directions or do anything), and other work trips and even sleep in the same bed as I did made a significant impact on my view of women in the world and how they viewed me.

I then met a friends sister (same friend as from college who set me up a lot) and she asked me out while we were on an ecstasy trip. I felt a relief like being back in high school and immediately unloaded about the 3 work friends. She would listen and seemingly understand what I was going through, but she kept at it and she and I would call once a week. Our interactions awakened a feeling of paranoia in my mind. My mother would vent on her marriage to her friends, which were mutual to my dad. Ultimately I felt a fear that if I messed up, my actions would reverberate through my friend group and ruin what little reputation I had. At this point she pointed out she only saw me as a friend. We spent time on a vacation and I didn’t initiate fearing I still didn’t understand what was happening. However, I got fed up when she visited DC for some friends and took a risk to make a move on her, that I could barely understand myself. We had sex, but about halfway through I do recall my roommate coming back and immediately having paranoia about bothering his night. So while I tried to keep going, I lost my erection. We did wake up the next day and I wanted to engage her, but I recall being very rough and ashamed for being so. Later in her home town the next month I went to a party with her and her work friends and I do not recall much besides getting drunk. Hearing her that night saying she didn’t want to have sex, and then taking that to mean she had to be explicit with me the entire rest of the trip for me to be allowed to initiate again. She never was and I remember just watching her sleep without doing anything. We ultimately had our last discussion before she left about how she wanted to just have fun and how I was not seeing what the point of fun was.

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After this year, I ended up not only facing consequences by drinking, lusting, and smoking. This fell apart after I began to move away from the people that I worked well with even though I felt that my life was starting to change. I drove drunk and got into difficulties while driving and texting with a coworker I was interested in. This along with the breakup of the work team, and a fight with one of the coworkers led me into a spiral that culminated in a multiple instances of driving drunk and then blacking out and losing my phone, wallet, and laptop. I identified and took action on staying sober at this point, though I cannot recall the exact reason for joining the support group I did. I did keep smoking for a few months, but I was a regular dick in any social situation and otherwise I would just collapse in my head and not talk to anyone depending on the level of the high.

About 3 months into sobriety I realized that porn was either just as bad or worse than the drinking. Namely the days I would lose to hangovers would become ever more lost due to the weekends spent masturbating. I had also started to use anonymous browsers and started making accounts for online forums to view the content. I did start interacting with people as well, but it was largely as a means to streamline and encourage more content rather than actively trying to provide my own. This also became a period of time during which I realized how much masturbation would help me sleep as my two weeks of avoiding it resulted in poor sleep and restless mornings. I lasted about two weeks without porn once. But I would start to travel and land myself in situations where I would spend entire nights on my own in different cities instead of with people in the support groups, with friends, or more importantly just resting.

I did end up meeting two other women online, and I enjoyed one’s company (though she did admit to scamming from an online marketplace). She ultimately took the lead in getting me into her room on our second date, but seemed to know the entire time that she could do that and that I wouldn’t have the ability to lead her there myself. She tried to have sex, but I was still not happy with my last performance, so I settled for lesser options and didn’t meet her view on it as a one night stand maturely for a while. I made a female friend in one of my groups and when speaking with her one on one, she openly told me about her skills at oral, but that she didn’t like to talk about it. I decided to mock her for how she changed her moods and said terrible things to her via text, to which she has since stopped talking to me. This repeated itself with a friend from college. I would repeatedly talk down about myself and question her decision making for her past experiences she was describing to me. In both cases I was actively trying to avoid intimacy in order to just get to sex if possible.

On a trip with the red cross I ended up meeting a woman also volunteering but on a different shift. I didn’t have the guts to exchange numbers immediately and another volunteer was kind enough to initiate that for me. Effectively we did chat, but I decided I had no chance at some point and while I believe she was trying, I stopped. Attended a wedding where I could have at least tried to talk to one of the bridesmaids. I made a fear based decision not to do so. Then I drank I glass of champagne and started to follow whiskey around the party and decided to bail out of the situation.

For about another year, I would keep this process going of intermittently watching or reading porn and my interests began to shift to harder mainstream avenues (along with the industry in general) but I would also find myself reading and listening to interviews of the actresses and sometimes other performers and began to feel drawn to them as people and less of an urge to partake in watching their actions. Rather I wanted to start getting involved in the actions myself. I was then unable to stop for many circumstances and while I would work to avoid cannibalism and death porn, I would make slips into that and PMV and hardcore aspects. In affect, I would go to meetings to work to remove this urge and know that I had just come from watching porn and that I would go right back to it.

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My perspective alternates now between viewpoints that are summarized by the below:

At this point, I cannot keep sexual imagery out of my head when interacting with women and repeatedly get frustrated by not being able to talk to them long enough to at least discuss that topic. I have tried to engage in erotic writing, but fail to put in the real time/effort to make that a reality. I have lost long term determination to create and develop an artistic skill. I repeatedly binge and purge with respect to physical fitness, socializing, adrenaline, and entertainment now and it is a daily struggle not to just watch porn. There is a good chance that when I read this I may have already slipped that day.

I get that it takes time to learn these things, but it’s a daily struggle at the moment to confirm I want to. I did see people at gyms try to speak with me and avoided them and I know that as time goes on I sense that I will want less and less to do with women. Due to sheer frustration. I understand I have to keep trying and persevere, but there’s a time to reflect on whether I am not following my path.

But every day, I feel a sense of hope that I can overcome small elements of these social and emotional fears that I have been working for years to avoid. Whether it happens is unknown. But I hope that my time working on this will give others hope that there will be a chance to overcome theirs in time. Most importantly of all is the belief that all of the women and men that have played unnecessarily dedicated roles in helping me see where I currently am can also exist for others as long as people are willing to put aside their normal social norms and find those that are hiding behind their fears. If you have made it this far, you probably are someone who is capable of doing just that. So do not give up and only pick 1 or 2 favorites to improve the days of. Fight to be a beacon of hope for all who are suffering, whether they demonstrate they deserve it or not.