things got complicated after that but i don't regret it, it was very growthy, cried a lot, worked through stuff, hopefully became a better person, it was a whole adventure
funny thing is that i didn't make the connection between these two events until just now, a year later
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i want to clarify that this was extremely out of character for me. i wasn't able to use dating sites ever because i was too paralyzed by fear to message anyone. at the time i did not understand where i was getting all this new sexual confidence from, besides possibly crying
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my impression is that this is not an unusual nofap story tho, based on skimming /r/nofap this is A Thing That Happens. so that's neat
having said all that, i think nofap can work a *lot* better if you also have a meditative / emotional processing practice to go with it
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intentionally denying yourself masturbation can bring up a lot of stuff - your relationship to pleasure, to masculinity, to porn, to making commitments to yourself, to your parents, to your parents' religion... better to have a way to work with that stuff if you can find it!
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and along the lines of my "escape addiction" thread, to the extent that you're using porn / masturbation mostly as an escape from other things, denying yourself that escape could bring up whatever it is you're escaping from
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The key feature of escape addiction is that it's an attempt to escape something, which means where it's escaping *to* is less relevant for understanding it than what it's escaping *from*.
If you take away the games or the porn or w/e you'll just find a new escape.
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most of the people doing nofap are probably doing it with a lot of internal force - you can guess from the way they talk about breaking their streaks, lot of shame involved - and without a practice that's capable of going meta on that use of internal force things could get messy
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also made the very good point that a lot of what people on /r/nofap report as effects are similar to the effects of not feeling sexual shame, and insofar as sexual shame is in the mix, doing nofap without a practice for working with it could entrench it more deeply
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depending on what your relationship to your sexuality is like nofap could be exactly the wrong thing for you, maybe what you really need is to go all in on learning how to allow yourself pleasure, who knows (i certainly don't, that's what a sufficiently good practice is for)
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there is this whole realm of sexual practice to explore and it's unfortunate that it's weirdly difficult to talk about. i've also benefited a lot from a practice where i masturbated without porn but paid a lot of attention to my body instead, would also recommend that, super fun
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there is also this whole thing about exploring why it's hard to feel horny in any particular moment (usually it's ~feelings~). here is a very lovely blog post about this:
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i have lots more opinions but i am going to shut up now. good luck!
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