What Even Is This Blog?
It would only be a little unfair to say of my adult life that my most remarkable “achievement” so far was a catastrophic act of self-destruction. The culmination of a decade and a half guilty pleasures – which came to dominate my life as much as any addiction could – was getting arrested after an extremely inappropriate conversation with an underage girl, a sting operation run by the county sheriff. It was upon becoming a felon and registered sex offender that I was forced to go back to my beginnings to understand how I decided upon the path that led here.
Pulling the threads of my knotted dysfunction apart forced me to reconceptualize virtually everything about myself, my relationships, my habits and hidden assumptions. Now that I am six years past that catastrophe with a radically re-formed marriage, self-understanding and faith life, my aim here is to recount the path that led to freedom and firm footing. My story is a more pronounced version of a struggle that I know millions are facing today. Escaping the rot of sex addiction for most won’t involve a night in a jail cell, but the predicament is nevertheless the same.
To be clear from the start, this is no attempt at an apologia for bad behavior, not a plea for pity or some rhetorical “if only you understood what I’ve been through” device to put me in a better light. In fact, there are few less deserving of such pleading. I was raised in a happy home by parents who loved me, well educated and encouraged to go far. Nevertheless, from teenage years I turned away from healthy engagement with the world and found refuge in the gingerbread house of online sex.
Refuge from what? There was some silent nagging crisis at the root of all this that I faced. The reason that I am writing here is that I believe it is the same crisis that is defining culture shift and conflict today. The crisis is too complex to even summarize here. It is something to do with everything – its tendrils wrap around the foundations of our self-understanding. What I can offer to that conversation is an inside look at one man’s decades-long struggle for meaning amidst the fear of his own potential and the guilt of his failings.
My writing here is supplied by the gleanings of (perhaps excessive) introspection brought to bear against a conservative religious upbringing, an education in philosophy, and a fascination with the psychological effects of technology and media. And while my own crisis was hashed out in terms of uncontrolled sexual behavior online, my aim is to explore the deeper underlying knot of dysfunction and trace the path that led me from self-destruction to reconstruction.
It’s fascinating to discover that there is a lot of overlap between understanding yourself and understanding your culture. In the same way, my own internal re-jiggering reflects the cultural movements I see around me: The radical re-embrace of my ancient Christian heritage, the acceptance (rather than fear) of guilt, and conceptualizing the path ahead as one of sacrifice rather than satisfaction, self-denial rather than self-affirmation.
I am no specialist, but my generalist approach here focuses on the ideas and images of my Christian faith and the philosophical underpinnings of our culture. I appreciate that there is an unavoidable psychological aspect to these, which should be understood in its own right, and additionally, that all must be placed in the context of the rapidly transforming media environment of our internet age. So there is much to explore!
But above all, it is primarily my hope that by laying bare my own crisis and recovery I can help others on their journey through that same valley. Addiction is not something you can fix through sheer force of will. It is only the spider at the center of a vast web that includes how we understand sex and ourselves, moral boundaries, freedom, purpose, and Goodness itself. Getting a clearer sight of this broader context will do much good toward forming the new relationships and habits necessary for a healthier life.
The guiding star on this journey, the revelation that unavoidably appeared at every turn, is beauty. It is something that pervades and colors our world with sacred meaning if only we can see it. But porn is beauty commodified and desacralized; it turns those colors into a dull and guilt-ridden gray. Coming back from that is like curing a kind of blindness.
So while there are places to learn tips, tricks, and techniques to beat addiction, what I am going for here is a deeper exploration how we perceive. I will not always be talking about sex, but everything centers around the way we understand the world in hopes that we can place ourselves and our sexuality back into a more beautiful place.