Celestial Diary

Disclaimer: Mature & sexual content (16+)

Coping with addiction, and more specifically; lust, pornography, or masturbation, presents challenges regardless of age, gender, or spiritual maturity. Recently, a close friend confided in me about her prolonged struggle with this issue. It began innocently enough, with her noticing an interest in certain genres from a young age. However, before she realized it, the situation had escalated into something far more consuming.

She has wanted to share her story for a long time, but out of fear of stigma and possible repercussions, she chose to do so anonymously. With her permission (and anonymity, of course), I’m sharing her story. It’s my hope that by sharing her journey, others facing similar struggles will find solace in knowing they are not alone.

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I feel stuck in a circle of shame and I hate myself. I always feel isolated and alone because I can’t talk to anyone about my addiction. Porn is my way to run away from reality, but it’s hurting me inside. It makes me feel like I’m living a double life, hiding this ugly secret from everyone around me.

Anonymous

F: As promised, you now have the chance to share
your story and voice your struggles as you wished.
While I know some of it due to our personal history, I want you to speak freely
as if you’re speaking to someone completely unaware of your story and experiences.
I won’t interfere much, but I’ll be recording this conversation to make sure
I can accurately share your story.
I want to you be as honest and authentic as possible but seeing as we can’t control what happens to the story once it goes online or how people will react, I still want you to choose your words carefully. I don’t want to edit your words or change them for you
but at the same time we need to be careful about the explicit content.

A: Thank you. [Deep sigh] Where should I start talking from?

F: It’s your story. so you have complete control over
what and how much you want to share.

A: I’ll pretend this is the confession room in a catholic church [nervous laughter].
The very first sinful memory is me kissing my cousin when we were small. I think we were playing house. I can’t remember everything well but I know still that I was the mom or maybe the dad and we had to lie on the bed together. I wasn’t abused or anything if that’s what you’re thinking [awkward laughter]. We are the same age and she is a girl but I remember enjoying the feeling of lying so close together and kissing each other. It was consensual and not sexual, maybe just touching our lips, like a peck and not a French kiss but sometimes I still think about this and it scares me that as a little girl I enjoyed something like this. Oh and I’m not a lesbian!
[Long pause] hmmm I’m thinking of the timeline of my life so I know the next story.

I think nothing very special happened until I was a teenager in high school. Or maybe it was before high school. I think maybe in elementary school. I like to read and when I was younger I read so much books. After reading a lot of the books in my village library, I would go to the teenage section because there was no more interesting books for my age. And sometimes they were too childish. The tv-shows and Disney movies made me like the fairy-tale story of how love should be. It was different from the boring love stories and struggle love stories the older generation have.
I think, but I’m not very sure, that this is why I really loved the romance genre. So I would read a lot of romance books in the library and on Wattpad. I really loved Wattpad [smiles] because the stories were written by girls my age and a bit older and they let their fantasies go wild.
It’s very funny when I read them again when I was older because I saw how really dumb those stories were [shakes head in embarrassment]. I had an online collection of werewolf stories with an alpha looking for his life mate, or you know stories where the guy is very cold and mean but then meets a girl who makes him want to be nice and caring. Or sometimes fanfictions about boy bands or a rich guy and a poor girl pretending to be a couple so his parents can leave him alone and they end up falling in love [laughing].
Honestly I really loved reading those books. And it makes me sad to see that maybe this is were the problem started. [Deep sigh] Some of these books had sex scenes in them and those scenes were described in detail. I was shocked in the beginning because like I could almost see it happening in front of me and happening to my body. I liked the feeling it gave my body. Then I think I looked for similar stories so I could get that feeling back.
And I know it was bad because I always made sure I was alone when reading these books because it’s embarrassing to let someone see them. And also as a Christian, I know these books are bad for us but they were so interesting and they distracted me from my problematic and sad life that I continued.
I think it stayed like this until I finished high school and went to uni. But the books I read became more and more sinful and disgusting [crosses arms]. Some books would have women being raped and I still liked reading them. I think at that moment I felt like okay I’m a crazy person but I know rape is bad and this is a fake story. I made excuses for myself so I could still continue [crosses legs].
Then in uni or maybe the end of high school I started exploring my own body. In the beginning, I was just curious because I wanted to know my own body a bit more and also because I didn’t really understand how sex happened and the hype behind it. So I looked it up on the internet and saw the famous porn site everyone knows. And yes [plays with hair] I know it was very wrong but I was really curious [starts to fidget]. So after watching, I, you know, take a mirror and you know explore myself, touch myself and record myself. In the beginning it wasn’t more than that. I also hated the feeling and thought maybe something was wrong with me [teary eyed].
But when I watch romance movies or read romance novels, the naughty ones I mean, I noticed that my body would react and that was a feeling I liked. So for me the masturbation wasn’t a big deal in the beginning because I didn’t really like it. But then I would sometimes watch porn again to really see how sex was supposed to happen so I know what to do when the time comes [continues fidgeting] and you know once you start clicking its hard to stop.

F: I have a quick question. Because you told me
before about the struggle you had with lust
and sexual immorality which also affected your faith.
Were you already facing such struggles at this point
or is it something that came on later in life?

A: Yes [deep in thought] I was already struggling but not like now. I know the books were not good but I think I could make excuses for myself because they were just books you know. I like reading, romance is a genre and the stories are about life and sex is a part of life. I think maybe this was my excuse. But I think when the sexual content became more and more that I was feeling guilty towards God.
You [points to me] always say two things when we talk about sin with our other friends; sin is like nailing Jesus on the cross all over again and sexual immorality is like cheating on God.
Watching porn started because I was curious about some things and I thought seeing it would make me understand better. So in the beginning it was really innocent but I think when this habit became [using hand gestures] more sinful, the guilt came more and more. But then I ask for forgiveness and go on. But also because I really could not show it to the world that I was a sinner. [Shaky voice] My parents are important people in the church and I have to be a good child and example because they like to brag about me so even [teary eyes] after reading an erotic book or watching porn, I still go to choir practice or stand on the altar and then come back to my homework and start another erotic book. So the habit became normal for me that even with the guilt, [uncrosses arms and shifts in chair] it still continues.

F: Okay so to quickly summarize;
it started with watching shows or movies and reading books
that had this glorified version of love and romance.
And then as you got older, the type of content you watched became more dirty
and eventually your curiosity took over and led you to masturbation and porn.
Am I right?

A: Yes. But I also wanted to say that I didn’t act on you know the sexual desires I had. I’m still a virgin. Except for the masturbation because I was curious. So in the beginning the sin was always in my head and my eyes and my ears [points to herself]. I never had a boyfriend or even kissed a boy but I was always fantasizing about this.

F: Is the habit of fantasizing the lust you meant?

A: Yes. Because you know the bible says that if you look at someone with lust you have already committed adultery. I was always interested in boys and would dream about my perfect man but I didn’t like having sexual fantasies about them if i knew them in real life. That felt very wrong to me and also unrespectful to them so my solution was to create a fake guy in my head and fantasize.
I would have fantasies [speaking really fast] like falling in love, dating, getting married, the honeymoon, having children and everything. It was also like all planned out. Everyday I would continue the story where I stopped and change it if I didn’t like how it was going or i didn’t like how the fake husband was acting [laughs]. Even the honeymoon was always very detailed.
I remember going to the porn site again because I was curious to know how women orgasm looks like. It was very shocking to see all the crazy things that are online the more you watch the more other videos you find. [Using hand gestures] So I tried it on myself to see if it really happens like that but nothing really came out so I thought maybe it really only happens after real sex and not masturbation. And then I would add that to my fantasy. Like during the honeymoon, where to have sex, how many times, what positions, crazy things like that I saw online.
But only the fantasies were the addiction all this time. I did not watch the porn everyday or masturbate. I still had control. It was like a few times in a year but the fantasies were almost everyday.
I remember in church when the pastor preached about spirit husbands and the danger and it really scared me, so for months I was praying to God to help me so I could stop the sexual fantasies and it worked! For years I could not dream about having sex even when I tried to dream about it and I was really happy and I believed I was healed. I also stopped reading Wattpad and taking erotic books from the library. But I still watched romance movies. They’re everywhere and sometimes they can be innocent and cute.
Then I started having trouble at home. I was depressed and wanted to kill myself. It was really a hard time for me. I was failing in school, stopped going to class or doing my exams, my family was always fighting, [teary eyed] we were very poor and I was always thinking maybe if I kill myself, it would reduce their problems. For almost a year I was very depressed, I didn’t talk to anyone, I didn’t come out of my room and school was very bad.
To make the voices in my head stop, I started watching anime. I used to watch them when I was younger but now it was because I did not want to think about my own life. Then some of the anime I watched were over after one season and then I started reading the manga so that I could continue the story of the anime.
The manga sites were another problem for me because it had different types of genres. Then I started reading romance manga and the circle started again. In the beginning the manga stories were the fluffy romance types every girl likes to read. Then from romance, I read ecchi because it was a bit more mature and then from ecchi I went to smut because ecchi was not spicy enough. Then I started again to enjoy the feeling of the body [gestures to her own body] when I read the smut stories. To me it was more interesting than porn and less disgusting because I was looking at drawings and not humans. I did not like porn because I did not enjoy fleshy humans [makes a disgusted face] rubbing each other but the drawings were more erotic than watching raw porn.
And then when manga got boring because the pictures weren’t giving me that happy feeling anymore I started reading colored manwhas and the pictures looked so real and pretty that I got stuck there.
Sometimes I pray to God and try very hard to stop, I even [takes out phone] install apps to block my phone and it worked. But every time life gets hard, I run back to it again.
The real problem is that now its very hard to control myself from reading porn. It is my way of not thinking about my problems and even when I don’t have problems my body forces me. [Long pause] Sometimes the only thing I can think about the whole day is erotic comics and then I find myself doing it [shows her hand picking up the phone] and then my body will have a heavy reaction and then I catch myself masturbating and I hate myself for it. I really do. The moment the force and release is gone, I feel gross [crosses arms] and guilty and ashamed. Sometimes I can’t ask God for forgiveness because I knew it was wrong before I did it.
Every time I promise myself to shame the devil and stay away but then when I don’t fall into the temptations for months, I feel safe [takes a deep breath] and then one thing will make me fall again.
Like sometimes an argument with my friend or my parents will make me take my phone and read a comic to not think. And I know the pattern [teary eyes]. I know that once a open this comic site, I will start with innocent interesting stories but after some time they will not give me the satisfaction [voice starts to shake] I want and then I will go to the erotic ones.
And I also know that the moment I do this, I will hate myself [forcing tears back] after it but I still do it. I also struggle to pray and read the bible. I feel like a scam and I hate myself [starts shaking and crying]. I feel stuck in a circle of shame and I hate myself. I always feel isolated and alone because I can’t talk to anyone about my addiction. Porn is my way to run away from reality, but it’s hurting me inside. It makes me feel like I’m living a double life, hiding this ugly secret from everyone around me [bursts out in tears].

Short break

F: We took a short break to catch our breath,
and now that most of the story has been told, I’m curious about
what you hope to achieve by sharing it.
Beyond your fear of speaking publicly, why did you want me to post it?

A: I know I’m a sinner and abusing the love of God. I also know this is the consequence of my action. Sometimes I want someone to have a dream about me and scold me and sometimes I’m scared God has maybe told someone about my sin. I really want to do a deliverance because maybe it can help but in a country where nobody knows me. Its too shameful and I want to stop [deep sigh]. I want to feel close to God again [tears dropping]. I want Him to be proud of me and I want to serve Him without feeling guilty all the time. I was hoping, that maybe sharing this story and making people know will make me scared and stop. Also I was hoping for tips. I can’t pray anymore, it’s very hard for me now. I also tried listening to worship or reading my bible but it doesn’t work for me. I turn the worship off after a while and instead of picking my bible, I pick up my phone and read the comics. I want to change without shaming my family. I want to be a better Christian and enjoy serving God again.

End of interview

I didn’t share this story just for content purposes. I knew she wanted to tell her story, hoping it would loosen the power of the secret’s shackles.

Another reason for sharing it is to remind us of the internal struggle and pain others experience. We often see sin, judge it, and tell people to change, threatening them with hell, while forgetting that sin is simply an action God hates. Actions can happen to anyone, and for some, stopping is more difficult than for others.

That’s why I’m bringing this story into the spotlight, hoping others who face similar struggles see they’re not alone and maybe it’ll inspire them to speak out and ask for help.

I also understand that this issue can be a sensitive topic to discuss and it might feel uncomfortable for some to read. However, it’s important for us to recognize that many people are genuinely struggling (men and women). Instead of resorting to judgment or shame, we need to learn how to offer proper support and guidance towards healing and restoration.

All suggestions and ideas are welcome as I’m so overwhelmed with the story that I have no idea of what can be of help right now.

I intend to revisit this topic in a future post, after taking some time to think of ways to help those who find themselves struggling (in situations where it’s difficult to speak out) and how we can provide help and understanding to those who have the courage to step forward.

For those in need of professional care but are too scared to take the step, there are numbers you can call. The care providers on the other end of the line are willing to listen to your story and guide you.

• 106: No matter what you’re struggling with, they’re willing to listen.
• 1712: If you’ve ever been abused or are still a victim of abuse.
• 1813: If you’re feeling suicidal or having thoughts about death.
• 078 15 10 20: If you’re struggling with a drug addiction.

Stay Blessed x