It has been some time since I've shared so here goes.

I have seldom ever been truly happy, what with sex addiction, food addiction, paralyzing shyness, and stormy family relationships. Starting in mid-January, however, things began sliding. I found myself feeling more and more depressed, lacking even the will to live. My acting out continued at about the same pace as before, but caused a more severe emotional reaction - guilt, numbness and desperate crying inside (though I found myself unable to cry outside). I began losing interest in life.

Worse were the inexplicable "attacks" of very severe depression - feelings so intense I literally could not get out of bed.

Finally in mid-March I went to see a counsellor. She had no experience treating sexual addictions, so we concentrated on 'feelings' instead. I came to realize that I was very angry at my father for childhood emotional abuse and I learned to accept that anger and not condemn and suppress it. I only then fully accepted that what had happened when I was younger was not my fault and I was justified in feeling an intense rage at my father.

The therapy helped, but only temporarily and slightly. Furthermore, addictions seem to be multiplying. A friend gave me a disk for America Online, with a free 10-hour month. I started it, innocently, and discovered the interactive 'chat rooms'. They were far more user-friendly and easy to use than their Internet counterpart, IRC.

The chat rooms were a place where I could flirt at women. Here I didn't need to worry about women being turned off by my overweightedness or bad looks. In 'real' life I never flirt or show the slightest sign of interest in women who are not porn models or strippers; my bad self-image leaves me a hopeless coward. Online I had no such worries.

Only a minority of the women I met on AOL actually liked me. Nonetheless this had a revolutionary impact. For a man as hungry for love as I, even a friendly email from a woman my age is almost a manna from heaven. The few I did receive threw me into a wellspring of joy. So I began to spend more time in the chat rooms.

The sums of money I've spent are not large; about $17 in the past two weeks, barely half of what I usually spend in a single sexual episode. Furthermore, none of my chats are sexually explicit; I am, if anything, the perfect gentleman. It is possible to argue that chatting is a legitimate pastime and not an addiction.

However, I decided to see if I could go for 24 hours without once chatting and found I could not. This in spite of the fact that I have been to some extent neglecting other activities to spend time on AOL. That is what makes me believe I have become addicted.

A simple solution might be to simply delete AOL from my hard drive and throw away the disks. After all, I already have Internet access more cheaply through my university. Yet I find myself unwilling to do this. I have made several female friends, one of whom I am decidedly "attracted" to (if that is possible); I don't want to lose email contact with them.

This is a genuine need. I have been isolated from the opposite sex as human beings all my life; they have only been objects of fear or objects of lust. Talking with real women, bantering with them, is something I desperately want to do. I do not like to be alone; I am tired, deathly tired, of porn models and strippers and want real people badly. Yet I have no trace of romantic or sexual feelings outside of my addictions. I would like to much to date women; yet there is seldom a woman I actually want to date. It is though I have numbed myself off, cutting off all emotions outside the addictions, and cannot break out.

And of course, the only reaction that spurs when I think about this is self-hatred. Contempt at myself for not going to OA or SLAA meetings, procrastinating calling for locations, not going to counselling until near the very end of the school year, doing nothing to meet real people, torturing myself over and over about everything I haven't done to help myself...falling deeper and deeper into the black hole of depression and self-abasement.

I know this must have been a depressing post to read, and I am sorry for having written it. Thank you all for reading.

ARAS, April 23, 1996.