Escape Artist

So I'm realizing some consistent traits that are part of the template of how I do life. This is not completely new, nor especially earth-shattering but it's what I'm thinking about today and I want to write it down.

Obviously my current struggle with lust is a huge factor in my day to day life. In the early days of the Program (Sexaholics Anonymous) a person usually comes to realize that sex, pornography, and masturbation are not the issue, they are symptoms of the issue, the issue is lust. And lust is definitely an issue for me. But I'm seeing that lust is not ultimately what I 'want', lust is what I use to get what I want.

What do I want? I want to "feel good".

As I look back at life I see this pattern feeling bad and then escaping into fantasy. It was/is all sorts of fantasy; books, daydreaming, money, power, adventure, social, sexual.....almost anything to escape the reality of where I was at that moment. It's no wonder that once I discovered lust I used it consistently...it was cheap, powerful, and (seemingly) very effective at achieving my unspoken #1 priority of "Feel Good".

So if my main priority in life is to "feel good", I can see why I struggle so hard with sobriety and consistency in my walk with Christ. I pursue sobriety because I'm supposed to feel better when I'm sober. I think (at some levels) I pursue Christ and Christian life because the hope is that it will make me feel better, that life will in fact be better. But when sobriety or Christianity doesn't produce the more immediate results of "feeling better" I let go and turn to the one thing that appeared to make me feel better, for a little bit at least, fantasy.

So my prayer today is, "God please help me to live the life I have been given, not the life I wish I had."