Pls need urgent help 🙏🙏 don't ignore stuck between good or bad look confusion
I need honest opinions because I've been stuck on this for a long time.
For years I believed a nofap myth that after masturbation or a nightfall I would look worse, and that I needed 6–7 days to "look good" again. During those years I spent a lot of time worrying about reaching a streak and avoiding social situations until I felt I looked better.
Recently I realized that belief wasn't true. But after dropping it, a new confusion appeared.
I started noticing that people often stare at me in coaching, parties, and public places. Sometimes friends have noticed it too. At a party, I felt like a lot of people were looking at me. At coaching, I often catch people looking at me repeatedly.
The problem is that in 20 years of life I have never really been directly approached or clearly told that I'm attractive. Because of that, I keep getting stuck between two explanations:
I'm actually good-looking and I've underestimated myself.
I'm imagining meaning where there isn't any and I've been wrong about my appearance.
At one point I accepted that I was unattractive and strangely all my mental stress disappeared. I stopped overthinking, conversations felt natural, and I felt normal again. But then I kept having experiences that didn't fit that belief, so the doubt came back.
My question is:
Can a guy regularly get stares and attention without being directly approached or complimented much?
And has anyone else been stuck in a cycle where they genuinely couldn't tell whether they were attractive or unattractive because the evidence seemed to point in both directions?
I'm not looking for compliments. I'm looking for honest opinions and experiences from people who have gone through something similar.