So B"H today I am celebrating 97 days clean ODAAT. As I've mentioned in previous posts, it wasn't perfect, I wasn't perfect, but I let the clean time speak for itself. It's so important for all of us (myself very much included) that Hashem doesn't expect for us to move mountains, to be perfect angelic beings, just to try our best and be a little more sincere about it than we normally would be. If I could've done things differently again, maybe I would've tried to work a little harder or maybe not, but I think it's amazing that I have 97 days of clean time when just 97 days ago, I couldn't imagine more than 2 weeks of clean time.
What I want to write about is something that I've been slowly and painfully realizing since I reached 90 days. I don't want to write about the journey to 90 days, I want to talk about what happens after 90 days is reached. Taking on the 90 day challenge is a beautiful thing. It's an admirable goal to want to give up something that you know is destroying your life, your relationships with people, Hashem, and yourself, and to want to be just a "tefach hecher." When you're holding at 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, 3 weeks, 60 days, etc. it's something to admirably work towards.
But then 90 days is reached and then...now what? For me, this unsettling and slightly terrifying realization began to kick in: living a sober life. Living a sober life is an amazing thing, but for many of us, pornography was a central part of our life, might I dare say, one of the best things in our lives. Why else would we throw away perfectly good marriages, relationships, jobs, etc. for something if we weren't absolutely love-drunk on it? I'll be honest, I miss pornography, I miss the thrill of "tasting forbidden fruit", and it's weird to say it since it is the strongest poison I could possibly put into my neshama. I know that I cannot live a life worth living so long as I am actively using pornography. I also know that there are many people with many years clean and at some point, we need to stop romanticizing the struggle and just live a sober life.

Something that I have learned and am taking from my time leading up to 90 days into my post-90 days life is this: the real work begins once I reach 90 days. It's like the yidden when they left mitzrayim, it was then that they began to avodah of sefiras haomer, of bettering themselves. I know that I have so much internal work to do and BH I have enough distance for the actual averia to be able to do the work. It's not about another taphsic or another level in the wall of honor, it's about doing the honest work that I know I can put in, not worrying about others and making sure that I am held accountable and honest in my relationship with Hashem. Check out the recent post from Dov about why rabbis hate on 12-steps so much, it's so honest, refreshing, true...it's a perspective that we really need. No more fake life. Showing off how frum I am is just as much a fake life if not even MORE of a fake life than the fantasy I would get from pornography. No one said it would be easy, but it's the path of truth. If it's true, then there really is no other way. Sooner or later, we need to follow it.

Everyday has been getting harder and harder. BH, I would consider myself to still have my sober time, but I found myself engaging in behaviors similar to when I was acting out e.g. surfing facebook to try to find non-tznius photos, letting my mind wander to non-tznius things, all in an attempt to circumvent the taphsic that I set in place. Both of my knases are giving tzedaka, which I can't really afford to give the amounts that I've set, so I haven't acted out (I guess that's what the taphsic is for lol) but internally I've been boiling with lust. I was up really late last night literally just mindlessly surfing the web when a) I could've been doing work, of which I have a lot of or b) I could've been sleeping. Now I'm awake, tired, overwhelmed by my responsibilities, feeling guilty, depressed, a bit hopeless. I always tell people that this is a struggle that we'll have our whole lives, but that should be something that we find strength in, that we are Hashem's warriors, but when I'm in the actual battlefield, I feel overwhelmed by it all. Plus, I was on someone's facebook who is very much into the OTD culture and it's making me question my yiddishkeit. I get it: yiddishkeit is largely about the culture, which is full of fake people who just use each other to make themselves feel more frum. For us addicts or lustaholics, frumkeit is, in a sense, our worst enemy. The more hardocre that we lust or the more we act out, the more frum we become to cover it all up. What a horrible double life, what a perfect recipe for depression. I want to be frum, but I want to be honest in my relationship with Hashem. Maybe just acknowledging the hypocrisy and double-life is an honest step forward in my relationship with Hashem. Sometimes I just get so overwhelmed by it all....phew.....ok, that's my morning rant.

It's incorrect to say "I get it: yiddishkeit is largely about the culture, which is full of fake people who just use each other to make themselves feel more frum"
There are plenty of frum people who are real.

Iwtbf613 wrote on 06 Mar 2019 14:41:

#me3