May 16 • Pain Counts
Day 311 Sex was supposed to be the awesome-sauce of intimacy in my life. That’s what my world taught me. That’s what I believed, or more specifically, it’s what I assumed to be true. It might still be true some places, with some people, and maybe even with me someday, but whether it’s my addict or my self-centeredness, I seem to have destroyed that for now, if it ever existed in my life.
My sexual acting out has also created issues in me and around me that...
I don’t even know how to finish that sentence. I am a sex addict, but I think that needs a new label because it suggests I want sex all the time. But I guess it has more to do with... I dunno… This will not be one of my more useful entries…
I am feeling really flummoxed about this right now. Maybe that is because this was also a central issue in today’s counseling session with my wife. I’m still sorting through some of what was said there, trying to clarify it in my brain as well as my heart.
Clarity is an elusive butterfly that flits and teases and lands just long enough to allow admiration of its beauty. And in those rare instances when it allows itself to be touched and maybe even held for a moment, it is so terribly fragile and can be injured with a too-firm stroke of good intentions. So I’m trying to be content to just be looking for awhile. I’m weary of chasing these things of beauty, of adding them to my collection of fading, brittle, mounted prizes that I have captured and put on display so people can ooh and ahh and tell me how clever I am.
It does not matter whether I can put words and phrases in pleasurable patterns unless the words and phrases are true and honest and… and whatever is better than true and honest. Clever no longer counts in my life. Only truth. Only honesty.
And the pain that sometimes accompanies all things good. Yeah, that counts, too. –JR