There is something I struggle to admit even when I am completely alone.
It was not a revelation.
It was not an instant obsession.
There was no clear moment I can point to and say: this is where it started.
It was curiosity.
A small, almost ridiculous curiosity.
I read something.
Then something else.
I watched a video.
Then another.
I closed the tab and went on with my day convinced it was nothing more than a passing oddity.
What I did not expect was that curiosity would leave residue behind.
I was not thinking about it all the time.
That is exactly the problem.
It appeared at strange moments.
While I was working.
While waiting for a bus.
While trying to focus on something completely unrelated.
Small fragments.
Sentences.
Images.
Ideas.
Nothing particularly intense.
Nothing that should have justified the amount of space it was beginning to occupy.
For a long time I told myself that arousal was the reason.
Now I am not so sure.
Arousal was the doorway.
What came afterward was something else.
I started noticing that some of the things I searched for no longer excited me in the same way.
Sometimes they did not excite me at all.
And yet I kept reading.
Kept searching.
Kept trying to understand.
As if there were an answer hidden in the next page.
The next video.
The next story.
The embarrassing part is that I began recognizing patterns I did not want to recognize.
I was no longer interested only in what was happening.
I was interested in the feeling of depending on something outside myself.
The feeling of waiting.
The feeling of not deciding.
The feeling of being given permission.
That is much harder to admit.
Because it no longer feels like a fantasy.
It starts feeling like a question.
And the question is uncomfortable.
Why does the idea of someone else deciding when I receive something I want affect me so much?
I am not talking only about sex.
That is the problem.
The idea started spreading.
I found it in conversations.
In relationships.
In ordinary daily interactions.
As if my mind had learned to recognize a particular structure and then started seeing it everywhere.
There are days when I think I understand it.
That I know where it comes from.
That it no longer has any power over me.
And then something small appears.
A sentence.
A scene.
A memory.
And I feel that immediate reaction pulling me back to the beginning.
It is not exactly desire.
It is not exactly fear.
It is not exactly pleasure.
It is something worse because I do not know what to call it.
Sometimes I think what truly traps me is not the reward.
It is waiting for the reward.
Not approval.
The possibility of approval.
Not relief.
The promise of relief.
And when I realize that, I feel a kind of shame that is difficult to explain.
Because it means I spent years feeding something I did not even understand.
I thought I was exploring a curiosity.
Now I suspect the curiosity was exploring me.
And that thought keeps growing even when I try to leave it behind.
Maybe because I no longer know where the things I read end and where I begin.
My neck I am not moving it the record cannot close I should…
