Howdy ladies and gentlemen.

First of all I want to say that I never was an outright member of both movement. I agreed with some concepts and while I never fully drank the koolaid, it profoundly affected me and after 2 long years of being consumed by this ideology, I can finally say that I got it all out of my system. I write this with the hope that it can help others dealing with the same stuff that I've dealt with.

The beginning

It all started when I was about 17/18-ish. During this time I used to browse 9gag a bunch and in there I would sometime read about people being screwed over, relationship wise. At the time I just thought "shit happens", but those posts would come again every now and then.

My downfall really started on quora and reddit. A big difference between 9gag and these 2 Websites was that the posts didn't have character limits. Quora questions like "how you found out that your xxx was cheating on you" and subreddits like r/Relationships would lead to posts with lengthy explanations as to how people (usually men) would be cheated on in the worst way possible. I remember how I would spend entire afternoons scrolling and scrolling and this made me extremely anxious.

My current situation was as follows: Overweight, virgin, no friends and my self confidence was at an all time low. Just to make you understand how bad it was, I loathed and was fearful of calling delivery services / making appointments and I almost had a heart attack while asking for a summer internship over the phone.

The redpill and mgtow

This is when I started to discover the redpill. I watched channels like sandman and other mgtow related stuff and would start to lurk repill and mgtow subreddits. In the beginning it felt as if the pandora box was opened. They said that Women would cheat on you regardless of your value as a man and that they would milk you dry if you let them do it, and everywhere I looked, I would just find more stories that would confirm what I've read and heard from this redpill people.

Even though I was deep in the red pill, I still would have not considered myself to be an outright member of these group. You see, while I believed in hypergamy and the 20% / 80% stuff, I still couldn't buy the "all women are like that" mentality, both from a logical but also an emotional point. i.e. the overwhelming majority of pedophiles are men, but I never heard women saying anything about all men being child predators (as far as i'm concerned). I also have a wonderful sister that is in a relationship and looking at them I would see the exact opposite of what the redpillers would say. She would often spend money on him, she took interest in what he did, etc. If my sister was like that then it wouldn't have been a far stretch to also believe that other women like my sister existed.

To be completely honest I wasn't angry at women, I was scared of them. I was scared that I could be cheated on, that if I got married, they would divorce me and take my stuff or that that she could have an affair and I would have raised a child that was not mine. To give you an example of how deep my paranoia went, I often played with the idea of having hidden cameras in my house, trackers in vehicles and taking paternity tests behind a potential partner's back just to be sure that I wouldn't not meet the same fate as the people who got fucked over.

How I got out

Well, to be completely honest it was a multitude of things. First thing first, I deleted reddit and quora. This places were tainted to me and even nowadays I get somewhat nervous if I enter these websites. The next step was actually going my on way. Instead of listening to bitter and resentful people, I slowly began to block their generalized opinion and actually started to build an opinion of my own. I started to hit the gym (lost 21 kg / 46 pounds) , learned to be impartial and to take any opinion with a grain of salt. More importantly, I started to be critical of my own beliefs. If I didn't have a sound logic to it, it had to go.

Now I'm 20 and I'm far more calm and retrospective person. I'm still a shy guy and still never had a girlfriend, but that's just what it is. I learned to not being so fearful of random people and more importantly pizza delivery services.

On Monday I will call a company to see if they will give me a another summer internship and to be honest, I'm already shitting my pants, but at least now I know that I have to face my fear instead of letting it dominate me.

cheers.

EDIT:

I called. It went good. Nothing official because of the current situation, but I'm confident I will get the place.

Cheers.