Enough

Letter to myself:

Dude – enough. You have made so much progress. Think of all of the areas of your life. Your faith. Your personal direction and goals. Your body. You wife. Your kids. Your job. Your house. Your income. Your business. You have everything. Literally everything that you could ever possibly want. Things that men in your position would beg to have in their lives. And what brings you down? Your lust. Decisions you make in a split second undermine absolutely everything else you have achieved in your life. And for what? That quick moment of excitement? It’s gone faster than it set on and you feel like crap about yourself. You overwhelm yourself with routines and doing this and that and it gets to the point where you can’t spin any more plates. You can’t juggle any more balls. You just build and build and build and then you lose it all. Am I pushing too much on you? Do I need to direct the focus? Am I reverting back to the base? The base that has been the constant since the beginning? The one point of comfort that I turn back to has been and continues to be lust. No matter what it is man – you have so much going for you. No one thing is overly stressful. You are involved at church. You are a great husband and dad (when you are engaging and want to be one), You are good at your job. You have a great business. You have all of the money you will ever need. Most of this stuff that people find as difficulties in your life you simply don’t have. Yours is your mind. Get over this and you are free. Beat this and you are liberated. Be the man you want to be and you have it all. You are living in an absolute dream world. You are on a Hawaiian beach on the greatest day ever recorded. But you have this rain cloud over you that is ruining it all. It is not letting you fully enjoy the life that is being lived around you. You are wasting it. You are having seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years of pure bliss going on around you but YOU aren’t letting it sink in and YOU aren’t letting yourself enjoy it. Solely by the decisions you are making for yourself. You’ve made the progress. You know the science behind the addiction. You know the steps you need to take to win. You know the process. You have the tools. You are clean for days and weeks and then in the splittest of seconds, you destroy all of that. The hours of content you have invested in are gone. Why do you let that happen? Why would you spend that much time developing a skill, building a project, pouring your literal heart into something only to light it on fire and throw it away? That is unfathomable to ANYONE including you. So why? Why do you continue to let yourself do this to us? Enough. I am changing things up. I’ve taken the courses. I’ve read the materials. I’ve done the same things over and over and I always find a way. Rather than fail and try the same things again, I am changing drastically what happens and how this ends. This ends now. Enough.

Letter from my sex addict:

I am a fleeting existence of you. I am around for a fraction of your day. I am that split second in the morning that reminisces “what if”. I am that minute you sit down to relax and you think “remember when?”. I am not the real you. I am a culmination of your past thoughts. I am the collection of what is etched on the walls of your memory. I am not living. I don’t scream “hey, look over here”. I am just here. I am just the billboards you drive by. You can look or you can ignore them because you are busy doing something more productive. The sex addicted you is not you at all. I am merely something you can pay attention to. I am a snap shot of your past. Think of the millions of memories that you have had over your life. First – how many do you actually remember? How many went in and out, never to be recalled again? Second – How many do you remember every so often? How many are brought back by a song, a smell, a sight? Finally – how many do you recall every day? Why? Why are these thoughts and lustful memories the ones you recall every day? Why don’t you recall that feeling you felt when your wife told you she loved you for the first time? Or how you felt when you first kissed? Why don’t you recall when your kids were born every day? Why don’t you feel the joy you felt when Christ rescued you from your life? Why don’t you focus on the good things in your life? They are all the same as me. They invoke emotions and feelings. In fact, those will feel better and last longer because they have had a positive affect on your life. The sex addicted thoughts evoke similar emotions but yield opposite results. So when you want “me” to write a letter to you, I almost can’t because I am not a thing at all. I am just what you recall. I am not there at all. Don’t build me into something I am not. Don’t make me into a monster. Don’t make me into something that cannot be defeated. I’ll admit. I used to be a much much bigger part of your life. A constant part of your life. That isn’t the case anymore and you know it. I used to be the occupying force. I lived and breathed freely and ran the show. You declared war on me and I was forced out. But I am still around. I am just engaged in guerilla warfare. I don’t openly patrol the streets. I don’t attack every day. But when I do, it is quick and destructive. It’s just enough. I can kill by a thousand cuts but only if you allow it. Again – I am not a thing anymore. I am something you merely allow. If you don’t allow me, if you don’t accept me, if you never let your guard down, then I am a non-issue. The issue here is that you do allow me. You let moments of weakness build. You let small attacks in, little by little, until the wall falls and like that, I am in. That is all it takes. You have to be right 100% of the time. I only have to be right once. That sucks but again that is how the devil fights. It isn’t fair and the rules of engagement favor the enemy but the good guys still win. And we are better for the fight. So stop blaming me. It’s on you.