There is something I almost never talk about because I don’t even know how to explain it properly.
People assume all of this started with arousal.
And yes, it did.
At first it was simple.
I would see something.
I would get excited.
I would close the tab.
And move on with my life.
What I didn’t expect was that the curiosity would survive the arousal.
That was the strange part.
Because my body would calm down.
My mind wouldn’t.
I started looking for things I had already seen.
Not because they excited me more.
But because I felt like I had missed something.
Like rereading a paragraph because you’re convinced there is an important sentence hidden inside it.
I remember ridiculous nights.
Two in the morning.
The room completely dark.
The light from my phone reflecting off my face.
And me thinking:
“I’m only going to look for five minutes.”
It was never five minutes.
What embarrasses me isn’t the content.
It’s the persistence.
The repetition.
The way it kept returning.
There were days when I was working and suddenly I would remember an image.
Not a scene.
Not anything dramatic.
A detail.
The way someone lowered their head.
The way someone waited for permission.
The expression on someone’s face when they thought nobody was watching.
And then I would catch myself thinking about it for half an hour.
The worst part was that I started recognizing patterns.
I knew exactly what I was going to search for before opening the browser.
I knew exactly which words I would type.
I knew exactly which videos I would ignore and which ones would make me stop.
And every time it happened I felt this awful mixture of relief and shame.
Because part of me already knew the route by heart.
For a long time I kept calling it arousal because that was the easiest explanation.
But eventually it stopped feeling like arousal.
Arousal is quick.
This wasn’t.
This was slow.
Sticky.
Persistent.
It stayed with me after everything was over.
It sat next to me while I worked.
While I cooked.
While I tried to read something else.
Sometimes I would close everything and think:
“Okay. That’s enough.”
And an hour later I would find myself opening the exact same pages again.
Not because I wanted to.
Not because I didn’t want to.
That’s the part I still don’t understand.
It felt more like scratching an itch that never completely disappears.
And the harder I tried to stay away from it, the more aware of its presence I became.
What is difficult to admit is that eventually I stopped looking for images.
I started looking for explanations.
Then testimonies.
Then journals.
Then people who seemed to feel something similar.
Because I was no longer trying to understand what excited me.
I was trying to understand why I kept thinking about it.
And I think that was the first moment I felt afraid.
Not afraid of what I was looking at.
Afraid of how much space it was taking up inside me.
Even now there are moments when I catch myself thinking about it without having decided to.
And for a few seconds I feel the same shame.
Not because it exists.
But because it seems to know paths inside my head that I still don’t know myself.
My neck I am not moving it the record cannot close I should…
