I started at twelve, with an unfiltered phone. At university I realised I was no longer choosing: I'd close the tab and be back ten minutes later, my notes untouched. What changed me was understanding it wasn't a lack of character, but a habit trained over years. Today I've gone several months without going back. I'm reading whole books again, studying without the fog, and looking people in the eye.

My partner found my history and I watched her face break. There was no other person, but to her it felt just as real. We nearly ended it. I sought professional help and we talked without hiding for the first time in years. I relapsed twice, and she knows everything: that honesty is what saved us. A year later we're still together, and the intimacy we have now doesn't fit on a screen.

At 29, my body responded to a screen but not to my girlfriend. A doctor told me about porn-induced erectile dysfunction —he explained the evidence is still emerging, described in clinical case reports— and my case fit. I cut it off completely. It took months of abstinence, with flat weeks where nothing happened. And one day, it came back. Slowly, with a real person. That's when I understood I wasn't broken.

Mine didn't start with the internet: it was magazines first, then whatever came along, whole decades of taking it as normal. At fifty-two, after more than thirty years, I asked myself for the first time what it was costing me. It wasn't a collapse, it was a background exhaustion. Quitting at this age made me feel ridiculous at first, as if I'd arrived too late. I hadn't: I got back a calm I no longer remembered having, and my marriage noticed before I did.

I was nineteen and on the outside everything looked fine, but I slept terribly, struggled to concentrate and was irritable without knowing why. A friend told me about this and I tried cutting it off just to see what happened. The first two weeks were strange. Then, with no drama, I started sleeping through the night, studying without checking my phone every five minutes, and having energy in the afternoon. I cut it off in time, and I only wish someone had told me sooner.

Three weeks in with nothing, I felt no euphoria: I felt nothing. On the forums they call it the "flatline" —no drive, no desire— and knowing others described it the same way helped me not give up, even if it's not a medical term but community vocabulary. Then came what they call the "chaser effect": one relapse triggered a brutal craving the next day. Putting a name to those traps took the panic out of them. I'm still at it, but each week I understand the terrain a little better.