Hello, Friends.

My name is iLoveHashem247. I am a married man with a supportivewife and three wonderful kids. Looking at my life from an outsider's perspective, you'd think I have it all. I own a renovated home on my own private road with lots of land, run my own business with which i support myself, am fortunate to be able to learn many more hours a week than i work,  and am a popular and recognized member of my community- and I'm not yet 30 years old. But all this comes with a price tag - a lifelong struggle with addiction, mostly with marijuana and risky sexual encounters.

I had girlfriends in high school before becoming BT, and had shmirat habrit challenges, like most teens. I struggled with SB and engaging in sexual activities at massage parlors but was able to be clean for at least 6 months before marriage. during my wife's pregnancy with our second child, i unfortunately reverted back to my pre-BT habbit of recreational marijuana during the stress of a second pregnancy (the first one outside of the shana rishona "infatuation zone"), which in turn let down a rabbit hole of other issues... i had recently been visiting massage parlors, not for the sexual experience (i do not engage in any "happy endings" anymore, rather when i do succumb it is for the exhibitionism that i can indulge in without making a massive chillul Hashem). I am also very disappointed to admit that i had a sexual encounter with a shiksa who picked up a business card i had left at a restaurant i ate in, she sent me lewd photos and we met up one time (sept 12, '22) where she performed oral sex on me.

I am struggling to break out of these addictive patterns - i have recently filtered my home office desktop, my work laptop, and my smartphone i use to run my business (main issue was watching movies and free "live cams").The crazy thing is that I am a person who has made such amazing changes in my life - in many ways, I am the kind of person i look up to and always wanted to become - but it is the sticky residue of my past life that I'm having such a hard time getting rid of.

I am sick of who I've secretly become and the double life i am living.

I want to be fair to myself, honest and equitable with my wife, and and terrified of the shame i will face when standing before my Creator on my day of judgement.

Well, that was deeply revealing and I have revealed to you, fellow strangers, that which i have not even revealed to my wife. To be fair though, i have been fully open with her regarding the guarding of eyes and marijuana addictions, but have never ever discussed the massage parlor or infidelity.

HELP!

Checking in.

Still clean. Definitely a little slipping at the end of the week last week, but feeling grateful that the area of slippage is in shemiras einayim in the streets and not hardcore porn at the office. Still something that needs work and a lot of care that it doesn't become that first sip that drags me off the cliff. One tough thing is that my new job is in a much more urban and crowded area, and the streets are just alot more intense than where my previous job was. And keeping your head down while driving is just not so shayech. . .

Actually a funny story about that. I was thinking over shabbos about what works in the street and what doesn't. One thing I used to try was to look out for interesting stuff on the sidewalk - Rabbi Miller has a shtickel about looking for coins or something. And I so on shabbos I decided that that doesn't work since there's never anything interesting on the sidewalk and I should focus on other tools. But Rabboisei! Pull out your guitar and hum along! Hayad Hashem Tiktzor! There I was walking along this afternoon, and I happened to glance down. And what did I see? A hundred dollar bill on the ground!

Never happened to me before. Absolutely blew my mind.

Now, this would be a better story if it motivated me to keep my eyes down. Which it hasn't so far. We'll see. I've been getting somewhere with the "women on the street are not your eye candy" so hopefully I'll be able to keep on working with that. But it's tough.

The GYE calendar has me at 32 days but no idea if that's accurate or not. I have not been checking in at all, trying to actively avoid it, but needed a little chizzuk so checked in for the boost from the "streak." Either way, glad to be clean today.