Frustrated and confused about my sexuality

TLDR: Feel sexual attraction to people but kind of indifferent towards actually having sex. Have had bad experiences with porn and masturbation and am kind of repulsed by those activities, although I have a pretty high libido. Am not asexual but kind of wish I was.Apologies for this post being really long. I am a 19 year old male. I’ve never had any form of sexual contact or romantic relationship with another person in my life. I’m a very introverted person. I have a few friends and a close relationship with my family and I don’t really feel like I need anything more than that. I do like the idea of having a romantic relationship, but I wouldn’t say I need one and I think I could quite happily go the rest of my life without one if I had to. I’ve had “crushes” on two girls when I was in school, but one was when I was about 10 and the other was about four years ago and I completely lost all feelings for her when she started dating one of my friends. I never actually acted on my feelings for either of these people and I never really felt anything sexual towards them.I did feel plenty of sexual attraction to other people when I was in school though and this is where I start to get kind of confused because by definition this means I am definitely not asexual. Ever since I was about 12 or 13 I found plenty of girls at my school attractive and I used to fantasise about and masturbate to them quite a lot. I don’t think I ever really had a desire to actually have sex with these people and I certainly never had any romantic feelings for them (the only person I kind of had romantic feelings for in high school was the second girl I talked about before and I never viewed her sexually). I haven’t really felt this kind of attraction much since I left school, although admittedly I haven’t had much interaction with girls since then so that might be why. I still think about people I found attractive in school sometimes when I masturbate and stuff but now it just feels kind of weird and pathetic. I don’t want to think about these people anymore because I know they are people I will probably never see again and to be honest I don’t even like most of them.I also watched porn for the first time when I was about 12 and at first I don’t think it bothered me too much. I definitely felt a bit weird and dirty watching it and looking back I definitely didn’t watch it anywhere near as much as some other kids and it was mostly pretty tame stuff. But it was when I was around 13 I think that I discovered rule 34/hentai/fanfiction stuff and this was my first really negative experience with sexuality. Because of my introversion I guess, I’ve always been someone who’s kind of lived through fictional stories and fictional characters and stuff. So naturally being someone who was just going through puberty and starting to find people attractive, I started looking at/reading basically porn involving fictional characters. This had a massive negative effect on me. I felt so much shame and guilt that I had taken something that meant a lot to me and was not meant to be sexual and essentially ruined it by sexualising it. I was also exposed to a fair bit of fetishy stuff that I found really disgusting. Unfortunately I developed a bit of an addiction to it and it was kind of a case of something that both aroused me and disgusted me at the same time. Eventually I was able to stop my addiction to that stuff but I don’t think I ever really healed from it. I started having basically intrusive thoughts about fictional characters or sometimes even real people that I knew in sexual situations and this really disgusted me. This legitimately caused me to become depressed as I thought I would never be able to forgive myself for the things I had looked at and that I would be scarred by these intrusive sexual thoughts forever.At first I was relieved that I had gotten over that stuff and replaced it with more “normal” porn, but I soon found I started to have similar feelings about that. It aroused me but at the same time I just found it also really weirded me out at the same time. I always used to feel really bad and disgusted with myself when I had finished. I was kind of confused because pretty much all my friends watched porn and it didn’t seem to bother them. A few years ago I discovered NoFap and I thought I had finally found a place where I belonged. I started trying to get rid of what I belived was just an addiction to porn and eventually I did. I haven’t looked at porn in over two years, but then the problem became masturbating. During my final year at school I went about three months without masturbating, the longest in my life since puberty. While it didn’t completely fix my depression (there were other reasons for that), it did help my feel a lot more comfortable with myself.Since I have left school, I have continued to become more comfortable with who I am as a person. I’m no longer depressed and I am really comfortable with being an introverted person. I don’t feel like I need relationships or sex or even a lot of friends and I find that really freeing. For the most part, I’m really happy with my life. However, I still have problems with my sexuality. It’s gotten to the point where I kind of just hate the fact that I am a sexual person. I hate that I get sexual arousal and sexual urges. I still get urges to watch porn even though I know how badly that will affect me. I still get urges to masturbate to pictures of girls from school but at the same time I just want to forget about those people. I basically have the urge to masturbate but I have nothing to masturbate to that doesn’t affect me negatively. I don’t even really like the physical act of masturbating any more. It feels so animalistic and gross and I hate the smell and the mess it makes. Even when I orgasm it always feels underwhelming. I hate how I can’t think properly when I’m sexually aroused. I feel like I’m not in control of myself. I hate how sexual urges make me objectify people. The happiest I think I’ve been recently is when I went on a streak of no masturbating and I didn’t feel any kind of sexual urges (“flatlining” as its called in NoFap). I felt so free and honestly that’s what I wish I was like all the time. But of course eventually I’ll have a wet dream or something and the urges will come back.I don’t think NoFap is the right place for me because most of them are just trying to stop porn so they can get more girls and have more sex. I don’t care about having sex. I’m not opposed to the idea of it and if I ever did have a chance to have sex with someone I trusted I don’t think I would have a problem with it. But I’m perfectly happy without it. The idea of going to nightclubs and stuff and having casual sex is completely alien to me and I do get kind of weirded out when my friends talk about that stuff. I just wish I could get rid of sexual urges. There are so many things in my life that are more important to me than sex and I hate how much time I spend masturbating or trying to fight off urges. I genuinely feel like I have the mindset of an asexual, but I know I’m not asexual because I find people sexually attractive. I will see people on the street that are attractive and I will notice them and think sexual thoughts about them. I’ve started to feel aesthetic attraction too in the last year or so and I like that so much better. I honestly wish I could just get rid of my sexuality, or at least switch it on or off at will. The only thing I can think of I guess is just continuing to try and not masturbate and hope that as I move out of my teenage years the urges die down a bit. I’ll try and finish up the post here because it’s way too long as it is. I guess I’m just sexual and kind of sex repulsed at the same time. Maybe I’ll get more comfortable with my sexuality later in life or something. via /r/asexuality https://ift.tt/2J9APqn