I was nineteen when my ex opened a door I didn’t even know existed. He was twenty-seven, older, and experienced. I was a blank page he scribbled anything on. He introduced me to po*n like it was a textbook. He would show it to me and say, “This is how it’s done. Can you do it the same way?” We would watch. Then try to copy. Then watch again. By the time the relationship collapsed, I knew websites, categories, keywords and things I had no business knowing at that age.

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At twenty-two, I met Ken. I wanted to impress him. I wanted to be the girl no man could leave. So I went deeper into po*n. The hardcore, graphic ones, thinking if I learned everything, he would stay forever. And he loved it. He couldn’t keep his hands off me. I became his fantasy, his addiction. I thought that meant security. Instead, it meant bondage.

We dated for five years. I would break up today and go crawling back tomorrow. He cheated, I cried, he apologized and I stayed. I stayed because I thought all I had to offer was what I had learned. I stayed because I was scared no one else would want me. Then one day, out of nowhere, he told me he was getting married to another woman.

I begged. I cried. I offered to change. When everything failed, I whispered the most humiliating sentence of my life: “Go and marry her but don’t leave me. I’ll be your side chick.”

He left.

That was last year and that’s when po*n stopped being about intimacy and became my medicine. A painkiller. A distraction. Whenever the heartbreak felt like a stone pressing on my chest, I watched something. Anything. The darker ones.  The rougher ones where women are treated like slaves. The more degrading, the better. It numbed me. It drowned the ache. Soon I was watching it in trotro, taxis, even in church.

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Now I cannot go a few hours without watching it. It has become a chain wrapped around my neck, dragging me lower and lower. I tried seeking help from a man I trusted until he tried to sleep with me too. That broke something in me. It told me that even people who claim to help are only hunting for my weakness.

My life is fragile. I know I am standing on the edge of something dangerous. A ditch I might never return from. I want to stop watching. I want to breathe again. I want freedom. I am begging you, please help me. Just tell me something. A few sentences that will pull me away from this addiction.

—Ewuraa

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