A couple of months ago I opened up to everyone and shared a little of my past (here). This next week is going to be along those same lines.
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A long time ago, my dad told me something that I will never forget. It’s one of those random one-liners that has just stuck with me over the years. You can’t get addicted to something if you don’t try it in the first place. The expression was so simple, yet it made an everlasting impact on my life. There are many times that I can say I avoided doing something simply because of what my dad said when I was a young man.
But what about those times when it wasn’t up to you to try something? And so this begins my confession.
Back when I was in sixth grade, the internet was really just getting started (hard to believe, I know). Our elementary school was an early adopter and they had set up a computer lab with internet access for us to play around and learn the basics of computer skills. Teachers at this point were mostly clueless what all could be found on this new fascinating technology called the world wide web. I recall, that one day while in the computer lab, a few friends and myself were sitting in the back of the lab. One of them had an older brother and learned about pornographic websites and decided to show us all his newly discovered treasure. So there we were, in sixth grade, looking at porn at school and the teachers were absolutely ignorant. This was a first for me. I didn’t know that stuff like this existed. I didn’t ask to see it nor did I want to try it in the first place.
And that began the addiction. An addiction that lasted with me for a very long time.
Not long after teachers found out about porn on the internet, a friend of mine stumbled upon one of his dad’s Playboy magazines. He had brought it to school and left it in the park. This was the first time that I willingly went out of my way to look at porn. Around that same time another friend was printing pictures at home and bringing them to school in folders and handing them out to kids.
There are so many sad things about this situation but the main one is that I was a kid idolizing these porn stars. For whatever reason, this made me feel like a man. That is what a man should do and that is how a man should feel.
The addiction lasted through high school. My girlfriend at the time (wife now) actually found some on my computer and it crushed her. That was the first time that my addiction affected somebody else. Up to that point, I justified looking at porn by twisting the Bible’s word so that it was only wrong for married men to look at porn. I wasn’t married so it was ok for me. But then to see the devastation and hurt on her face, immediately changed my attitude about porn. I started making subtle changes in my life in order to avoid looking at it. But like all addictions, they are tough to break. And it had been 6 years or so since it started. Those subtle changes quickly broke down and were overcome by my selfishness.
Another couple of years passed, and I decided it was time to officially cut it out of my life. This time, it wasn’t about the subtle changes. It was about taking extreme changes. Getting rid of dvd’s that sparked interest, magazines, tv shows, and just about anything that may have triggered that addiction. Friends would go see rated R movies but I knew I couldn’t go, that was a hard one to give up. After successfully avoiding pornography for quite awhile, I decided to reintroduce some of those things back into my life. But I had to do it slowly. I didn’t mind seeing the occasional R rated movie or watching a couple of tv shows that had attractive women. We actually installed some software onto my computer that monitored all website activity and kept a log, and then at the end of the week it emails every website to a list of people that you input, I believe it was called XXXChurch.com or something like that.
We live in a sad world where almost everybody is judged by someone else. Where one addiction is said to be worse than another addiction. A drug addict is worse than somebody that looks at porn. An eating disorder is not nearly as bad as an alcoholic. In my opinion, all addictions that bring you away from God’s plan for you should be treated the same. They are evil and not one is worse than another.
Like almost all addictions though, you will have random urges. So tomorrow, I will go into some things that I do whenever those urges come back.