Personal Testimony - Porn

My name is Alexander John Bowman Risdall and I am a child of God, a recipient of the grace of God, and a follower of Jesus. I am a sinner made clean through no act of his own, but through Jesus. I was an avid porn watcher, I still have the thoughts sometimes - some nights get so bad that I need to physically leave my house and calm down. I started watching porn in 7th grade and I started out by reading porn on fanfiction - I was an avid fanfiction reader from, I want to say, 5th grade. I found reading porn in January of 7th grade and I didn't know what it was. All I knew was that it was making me feel good, I'm not blaming my education, I'm not blaming anything for my ignorance, but I didn't know it was wrong, all I knew was that it felt good. Then, as I started learning more, I learned that it was a sin, that looking and reading this stuff wasn't good for you and that it went against God. In 8th grade, I got so consumed by guilt and self-pity because I was already in too deep that I couldn't pull out. I tried for 5 years and I just couldn't. I prayed, I read my Bible, and I just couldn't do it. I still remember when I almost cried in class two different times because of my addiction - once was when I was in 11th grade and my teacher played a video and the guy on the video said "do you watch porn?" "Yeah" "Well if you watch porn then you don't really believe that God is omniscient because if you believed that then you'd believe God was in the room with you." That just struck me. Hard. The other time was in 10th grade when we got a whole lecture about porn and I just slid down in my seat and I even tried the program that they recommended, but I just couldn't stick to it. I've been clean for two months now (since the start of 2022) and I know that it's going to be a battle, but the thing that helped me a lot was journaling. Journaling my thoughts and feelings when the emotion appeared has helped a tremendous and also Biblical truth. The verse that always stays with me is "flee sexual immorality" because there are things that you just shouldn't try to fight, especially when you know that you're prone to addiction. I wanted to be better and I fought to be better, but I lost a lot of life to porn. And it wasn't just the porn, it was the guilt that came with it. The porn was bad, but the crippling guilt that came with betraying God, sometimes multiple times a day, and betraying my beliefs - that ruined me for high school. I'm not blaming porn for all my troubles because that wouldn't accomplish anything, but I know that it did have an effect on my brain chemistry and on what I acted like and I am still recovering. This isn't the only battle that has gone on in my life and so I'm going to do a few different installments talking about each different battle that has gone on and how God has been with me through it all, even when sometimes I wanted to give up on myself, He never did.