BLOG: Therapy and ABDL (Patreon)

(Content Warning: Mentions of suicidal thoughts)

Hello everyone!

Thank you all for your continued support! Thanks to you guys I have been blessed (or cursed) with having to pay taxes for last year. In one way I'm really happy because I made enough money to pass the minimum tax threshold... on the other hand it means paying taxes which is both expensive and annoying. Not helped by the government messing some things up but that's another story...

So, the real reason I'm making this most is because in about 12 hours I will be going for my first one-on-one therapy appointment in 18 years. It's long overdue.

I'm pretty certain I've mentioned my anxiety problems before. For those of you who are unaware I suffer badly from anxiety... REALLY badly. To the point that I get physical symptoms. Over the last couple of years I've suffered countless worries about my health. Most recently it is a constant lightheadedness. It looks like I might have an iron deficiency as the root cause but my anxiety has made it way worse.

Anyway, you might be asking "but what the heck does any of this have to do with diapers!?" and the answer is... I'm probably going to tell the therapist I'm an ABDL in the first appointment. Potentially very early in it. This therapist is kink aware and knowledgable about alternative lifestyles so it should be fine but it is still daunting!

The reason I will probably have to tell her about this is because it is a root cause of my anxiety. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE being an ABDL, there is no self-loathing here. However my first experience of extreme anxiety is directly attributable to me being into diapers.

In 2016, at the tail end of the year, the government here in the UK announced a plan to create what some dubbed "The Great Firewall of Britain". In effect it was a whole raft of laws regulating the internet. Some of it was about hate speech, some of it was about security... and part of it was about internet pornography.

Essentially the government planned to block all access to content to pornography it deemed "extreme." Some of the things they listed were genuinely extreme, things that are illegal for good reason. Other things were perfectly legal but were still going to be blocked... Among them age play.

They were going to block everything to do with age play.

This news immediately sent me into a spiral. Whilst ABDL is definitely a fetish for me it is also a huge part of my life. Diapers have reached their tendrils into pretty much every aspect of my life. My wife and girlfriend are both ABDLs and I met them on an ABDL website. All my friends are ABDL. My main online social hub is an ABDL Discord server. I am an admin on a prominent ABDL site. Wearing diapers is my primary form of stress relief. And ABDL porn is my primary form of a different kind of stress relief!

Importantly... ABDL was also my work. I wrote stories back then, I had a Patreon and I took commissions.

At a stroke the government were going to sever all of these links. It was devastating. Like, genuinely it shattered me. They were taking away my work, my favourite pleasures and my friends. They were making me feel like I should be ashamed for liking something that is an intrisic part of me. Something that I had showed an interest in practically from when I was out of diapers as a child.

I became almost suicidal. On one walk home from the shop I nearly threw myself under a bus. At home I couldn't do anything except sit, worry and cry. I literally could barely function for weeks. I closed my Patreon because even if I wasn't worried about everything being blocked I couldn't write. I could barely form coherent thoughts let alone work on my stories. It took a long time to get stable again. It was only when I was on anti-anxiety medication that I could start having something close to a normal life again.

Thankfully the government were forced to severely water down their plans and, in the process, the age play stuff was dropped. It was only when I heard that news at least six months later that I felt the anxiety starting to leave me properly. It was a little bit after that that I started writing again and then this, my second Patreon, followed shortly afterwards.

Whilst that was the FIRST major anxiety attack I had it was far from the last. It felt like a cork had been popped out with that first experience and now it has made it much easier for it to happen again.

All this to say I am long overdue in getting this stuff under control. Hopefully talking about it all will help and hopefully I'll learn to cope better. In the meantime I'm sitting here and feeling anxious (how ironic...) about that first appointment.