General Problems with Sexuality

So I decided to write on this forum because it was anonymous and I've been wanting to get some help with my problems. I have no idea if anyone on this forum can help, but I find bottling stuff up is counterproductive. I'll just write and most likely the process of writing itself will help me feel better. I had a day where I did nothing, and I think my depression is starting to come back full swing. I know this is the sexual addiction forum, but you'll see how everything comes full circle in a moment. This will most likely be long, so if you read through the whole thing, you are truly persistent and you have my gratitude for at least listening to my story.

The first time I had done anything sexual was when I was 23. I went through high school and my undergrad with no girlfriend or romantic interest. To this day I've never been on a date. My sexuality is very screwed up. My first time was with a man I had met on an online forum. I didn't know him at all, but I thought it was the best I could do. I had been out with a girl once when I finally got the nerve to ask her out to go with her and a group. Well, I wasn't sure I had actually asked her out, but she said yes and the night we went out she was dressed quite nicely. I was so confused as to what was going on because things weren't explicitly spelled out I reacted weirdly. Now that I think about it, it was obvious, I just didn't believe that a girl would want to go out with me. Now I'm not ugly. Some people say I'm handsome. I'm tall. I'm not into sports, so I'm a bit pudgy, but generally not a bad looking guy. I just usually never get a lot of attention from girls, and to this day I still don't quite get how it all works.

We had gone to an ice cream shop and I hadn't stepped up to pay for both of us. We had been talking one on one, but after that, she simply just went to talk with more friends because essentially I had rejected her, even though that wasn't my intention. I was expecting an engraved invitation. This happened a long time ago, and I had decided to give it a burial. However writing about it reminds me about how confused I used to be, how easy it was for me to lose my mind, and I still feel awful about it. It's funny. You can know what to do, i.e. keep the past in the past, but then when your mind turns to it your emotions come back.

So basically I felt so bad that I just knew that dating and love and sex and all that stuff was just not for me. I was missing something, or I didn't know something, or something in general was wrong with me. Other people seemed to naturally pair up with others. They had sex about the same age range (14-18), they did things like exercise and dress nice and do crap to their hair and whatever else to attract the opposite sex, and other people just seemed to find someone they could marry or couple with and it was just as natural as rain. Sex for me, as far as I was concerned, was unnatural. I had sexual feelings, a simply fact of being Homo Sapiens, but there was something about me psychologically that I could never go from talking to people in the normal world and then having sex with someone or being romantic with someone. Maybe I was too logical, maybe I thought sex was bad, maybe I just didn't think I could perform my gender role well enough. Eventually I decided I just just forget about sex, and just try to control my sexual impulses because sex just made me depressed. I would just learn to control my emotions and that way I could spare myself.

This of course didn't work. The more I suppressed, the worse it got. Around 23 when I was in Grad School, I started wondering if I had same sex attraction. I had only been attracted to 4 women or so. I got the butterflies, tightened chest feeling. The last one was a girl I worked with once. I felt lightheaded when I first met her. I...just had no idea how we would go from talking to being in a relationship. Did I even want that? Even when she displayed clear signs of attraction (well, clear now) I just either had no reaction or tried to just do something else. I didn't know if what I was saying was right, if I was being manly enough or impressing her. I just didn't get it. I knew she was pretty and there was something about her I liked (I like women who are really feminine). After awhile, she took it as rejection.

I started to question my sexuality a year later. Clearly my lack of ability to attract a girl or develop a relationship was troubling. Again, other people were dating, they got in and out of relationships, they developed feelings, and I just didn't. I went online and found a man who was like in his 40s. We met in his truck near my house where I was renting and yeah, I'll let you fill in the blanks. After that episode, I spent the rest of the evening in the shower crying on the floor. It felt awful. I felt like someone took an ice cream scoop to my insides. I went to talk to a therapist, but the free ones at the university had really nothing to tell me. They said "Well, if you're gay you're gay so just live with it and try to be happy."

Since that episode I've only ever been with men. I've never actually dated or tried to have a relationship, it's always just been about meeting for hookups. I've probably hooked up with 70 some odd guys, always off the internet and all strangers. After the first few hookups I'd feel awful and sink into a deep depression. It's a horrible cycle. Hookup->Feel like crap->Get the urge to do it again->Hookup, you get the idea. I don't have any STDS which is a miracle, and I've been checked up. I've recently told myself I'd quit hooking up, but when I get the urge to have sex it's such a strong urge it's mentally overwhelming and it takes such mental discipline to keep it in check I either go back to porn (which I've watch practically everyday since I was 16) or hookup again.

I'm so unhappy I don't know what to do. My life is awful. I know there are people with worse fates, don't get me wrong. Some kid in Syria dodging bullets in a civil war has a life far worse than mine. I have a job as a teacher. I teach elementary school. The job is okay, the salary is total crap, but I like doing it and I've actually gotten an award for it because my kids do really well. I've helped several kids go to the states best high school and pass the examination for it. I speak 5 foreign languages and am working on a PhD right now, so I'm not dumb. Although honestly I wish I was smarter. Some people really have their lives together. I am still learning how to drive. I got my permit, learned how to drive at 28 because I had refused to do so earlier. I am 30 now, and I just need to save up my money to get all of my documentation necessary. I still don't make enough for a car with all of my money that goes out for rent/food, etc. but I have a side business that is starting to pull in a bit of money. I'd like to live on my own. I live with my mom who I've been taking care of since I was 15 when she had an accident and was disabled. My father is a deadbeat and frankly I don't want to meet him ever. I met other members of my family online, but that whole drama is another ordeal I want to also bury with all other past events.

I almost hooked up with a guy today, which brought on this whole ordeal. We didn't end up doing anything but meet in his car. After I went home I found some excuse to call it off when we were supposed to meet. I felt so depressed, so worthless, so awful that I couldn't be productive at all today. When I am frustrated and depressed I snap at people and want to be left alone. I just stare at books or play computer games so I can feel something other than what I'm feeling.

If I'm gay I'm gay and that's fine. I just won't have children, or I'll adopt, which won't make my mother too happy because she's been wanting grand children and quietly nags occasionally about it, which makes me feel worse because what am I supposed to tell her? I'm broken and can't be fixed. If my orientation is actually straight or bi, then what probably ended up happening was that because my first sexual experience was with another man, my body is addicted to it, or I've trapped myself in a vicious emotional cycle, coupled with the fact that I want my father to accept me, and then you have someone who is addicted to sex. I can't see myself dating or marrying men. The thought isn't disgusting, it's just...lifeless. I wouldn't feel anything. I've never got butterflies in my stomach for a man before. I never got that mental twinge when you feel disoriented or light headed, and I've never felt any sort of pull. It was always about getting that addiction out of the way, when my emotional suppression would fail me, and when I just didn't have any more tricks up my sleeve to make me think I didn't feel anything and that I had the animal aspect of myself under control.

Like I said, I don't think anyone can do or say anything for me. I should be having fun right now. My job is fine, I have a side job which is working out more or less. People like me although I have a very small circle of friends. I have had a lot of creative projects fail over the past few years, but that is because I don't have a wide social circle, so I can't draw on that to help me. I'm learning I need other people to be happy. I'm very lonely which is what is driving my emotions, and fighting it and suppressing it is getting me nowhere. I know that. I just don't have other tools. I just end up sitting there, sad, lonely, and depressed if I just let my guard down.

It felt better just to write this. I may write more later. Good night.

I felt so depressed, so worthless, so awful that I couldn't be productive at all today.

I'm no expert or professional or anything. Just to be clear. Random bozo on the internet. This line really rang out for me. Both because I can relate to that. It's very hard to feel like I've "earned" time off. And also because this worthlessness. Seems to me important. Because if you are having troubles with self value. And seeing yourself as "worth" someone else being with. For something other than no strings sex. Then it makes sense that everything else will be confused and unsatisfactory.

mephisto123 wrote: Hookup->Feel like crap->Get the urge to do it again->Hookup

Are you able to identify the trigger that leads to the hookup urge? Is it something specific you're doing or feeling?