My story

As far as I remember, I was eight. A friend showed me on my older brother’s computer while we were really in the middle of something else entirely. I did not understand what it was, only that it did something to me I had no words for — a mix of curiosity and unease and the sense of having seen something I should not have. Afterwards I said the word out loud at home, almost without thinking, and I still remember the face that met me: startled and closed. The message was that it was something bad, and then the conversation was over. Without knowing it, I learned two things that day. That this was dangerous, and that you did not talk about it. The shame and the silence began right there, long before I knew their names.

1. 1

   Puberty and the secret

   I do not remember much of the next few years, but the seed was planted. Then puberty came, and everything turned upside down. Almost anything could arouse me, which made sense in its own way, but it felt overwhelming and impossible to steer. From about eleven it began in earnest. It happened in hiding — often in the bathroom with my family on the other side of the door, or late at night when the house was asleep. I was caught a couple of times, and each time the shame just slammed the door harder. The more embarrassing it felt, the better I got at hiding it. I learned to lie — not about the big things, but about the small ones, every single day. And a secret a child carries alone grows bigger than the child.

2. 2

   When it escalated

   What frightens me most, looking back, is how fast and how imperceptibly it escalated. The brain got used to the ordinary and started looking for something new, something stronger. What shocked me at first bored me six months later. As I got older, I ended up on sites and in groups with content I had never consciously set out to find, and that I felt wretched about afterwards. That is where it gets truly dangerous: the hunt for the next thing can take you places you would never have chosen if anyone had asked you directly. And I had a vending machine in my pocket that was always open, always free, and never said stop.

3. 3

   The loop of hits and guilt

   Over time it was no longer about desire, but about hits. A short rush, and afterwards a heavy, sticky guilt. It was a loop that fed itself: guilt, escape, more guilt. Every evening I promised myself tomorrow would be different, and every evening I broke the promise. Sometimes hours disappeared without my ever really deciding anything. And all the while the same feeling of being completely alone with it, as if I were the only person in the world who could not control something so simple.

4. One more time is the biggest lie.

5. 4

   When it took my concentration

   The price I only understood much later was my concentration. I thought it was about a few minutes alone behind a locked door, but it leaked into everything. I could sit down with my homework and read the same page five times without a single sentence sticking. In lectures I was physically present, but my thoughts were elsewhere, restless and hungry for the next hit. The night before an exam, when I should have been studying, hours could vanish that I never got back. I postponed everything — not because I was lazy, but because my brain was used to a reward that came with one click, and everything else felt slow and grey beside it.

6. 5

   What I never got to

   I finished university, and on paper it went fine. But I know how much better it could have gone if I had been present in my own life instead of half absent. I never took a student job alongside my studies. I never applied for the projects, the internship, the opportunities that could have opened doors afterwards and taken me further. I simply did not have the energy, and I did not understand why. I just thought I was someone who could not pull himself together. What I did not know then was that a large part of my energy was going into a fight nobody around me could see. You do not lose your life to this in a single day. You lose it in small pieces — in hours and chances that quietly disappear without anyone ever sending a bill.

7. 6

   The turning point

   What finally made a difference was not more willpower. I had tried to pull myself together a thousand times, and it never held. It was understanding what was actually happening. That it was not a moral flaw or a weak mind, but a reward system that had been trained thoroughly and early, exactly as it was built to be. When I started reading about the mechanics, something important happened: for the first time I could separate myself from the problem. I was not the problem. I had a problem, and a problem is something you can work on. I took small steps, fell back, got up again, fell again — and slowly, almost imperceptibly, the distance between the falls grew longer. It was never a straight line. It never is, for anyone.

I built Daggry because I wanted the thing I had lacked back when I sat alone with it: an honest place without wagging fingers, without shame, and without anyone trying to sell me a miracle cure. Just the knowledge and the tools I wish I had had when I was eight and understood nothing at all.

And if you are reading this and recognise even a small part of it, I want to say one thing to you: you are not broken, and you are not alone. What you are struggling with is neither rare nor shameful, and it is possible to move on. Not perfectly and not in a day, but step by step. If this can make your way even a little shorter than mine was, then all of it is worth it.