Day 818
It was the second moment to get my attention. It was the moment that made me ask myself whether I might have a problem with my sexual behaviors (the first happened a few days earlier when I found myself asking Mr. Google if sex addiction was a real thing).
She was nearly hysterical:
"Are you in a relationship with another woman?"
I had been in the hotel room all day, and I was calling her because I had not returned any of her text messages for several hours; I thought my voice of comfort would ease the moment and increase my chance of smoothing this over.
"You haven't returned any of my text messages today, and I can see that you're online, so I want to know who you've been chatting with. Is it another woman?"
Busted. It was another woman with whom I was trying to arrange an initial rendezvous, but of course, I lied about it. I manufactured some lame story about leaving my phone plugged in and unlocked, and that's what made it look like I was online when I really wasn't. She was not satisfied, and I knew I would pay a price for my inattention to her.
But here's the punchline, this woman on the other end of the phone was not my wife. The woman I was married to — and cheating on — was downstairs in a business conference utterly unaware of how I was using my time on her dime.
My accuser was one of my affairs. When I started seeing her, I was already cheating with another woman. This lady's indignation that I was being unfaithful to the unfaithful got my insane brain's attention. This reality-check didn't stop me from what I was doing, but it did make me take note of my accelerating behaviors.
It was also the first time I remember turning from being afraid I would get caught to being afraid I would never get caught.
Another four indiscretion-filled months passed before I began attending SAA meetings, and another six months after that, before I reached what I now count as my sobriety date.
I am not comfortable with including this story in my journal that my wife has permission to read. This is the kind of detail that will likely lead to some hard discussions between us, and triggering thoughts for her. I am doing it anyway because there is a pattern of learning to forget things that pop into my head if I write about them or tell them to someone. I am not recording this to remember it, but rather to be free of it.
I'd been driving for a few hours along I-64 in Virginia when this memory that I'm trying to exorcise appeared in the silence of trying to be quiet so others in the car can sleep. These are the moments when I fight the thought incursions most often.
We have now switched drivers, and my fight with this particular battle is once again playing out on the keyboard.
The skirmishes in my mind are the worst. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I do not want to extend that mentally habitually unbelievable part of my past into my future, yet it keeps showing up in my most vulnerable times. My self knows that this is the addiction not letting go, but my addict friend tells me that if I didn't want the thoughts, they would go away.
I wish the hell he would go away.
–JR
I just to try to stay alive
To witness where the battle lines are drawn
Speak my mind and sing my song
–Vinia Mojica, Talib Kweli, Michael Rapaport, Novel, “Stand to the Side"
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