It has been awhile since I've posted anything.  That's something I want to change.  I would like to keep up a regular blog again, since this helps keep my mind organized and keep a little more sanity.

I am in a very different stage of life than i was when i last blogged.  Since i was last keeping a regular blog/journal I was still in college, unmarried, and not working towards a career.  This is a very different stage of life now some two years and a few months later.  I am married, I've explored different career options, and am now working towards a specific goal in a career.  The list of struggles and even the general culture that is around you drastically changes as time goes on.  With different stages comes different communal and personal struggles.

I was going to write a longer post explaining the different struggle, but it came out as more of a prideful tone, which is not what i want to write or express.  Simply put, i'm noticing in this new stage of life people being more willing to check out of life relationally and sexually.  The line between one night stands and a porn addiction is very thin and commonly practiced.  It's sex without commitment, which doesn't allow intimacy.  It's a whole lot easier, sometimes it's more fun, but it doesn't practice the essence of sex; vulnerability and connection.  Mostly, i've been thinking about how while we think, and in a limited mindset, there isn't a cost to anyone else because of our sexual practices.  Reality is when sex is involved it always affects other people.  Particularly with porn.  Currently pop culture has been holding up the porn industry as something that is progressive and allowing people to take control of their sexuality and allows people to really be the on defining what your sexuality means.  On the other side of the arguments are people holding up people who say they are trapped, often times abused, run aways, broken families, and hurting. Regardless of what side of the argument you fall on, selling your sexuality to fulfill the fetish of a mass market isn't being in control of your sexuality, it's completely giving up control for a pay check.

Sex has changed me.  I have been in the deep side of addiction and I am now in a healthy marriage with a healthy sex life.  The hardest part of starting a healthy marriage based sexual relationship was becoming human again in sex. The idea of actually trusting someone completely with myself in sex was horrifying compared to a screen that did everything i wanted without interacting with me.  We're taught to take control of our sexuality rather than trust and mutually give to each other relationally.  Control and be protective of your sexuality and be safe, definitely, but learn how to practice vulnerability in the right places, learn to be completely unguarded with someone.  These are things i've never had a safe place to truly experience until I found my wife and she helped me rehumanize sex.

These are mostly rambles and this is becoming a long post again, but hopefully this is a more honest and less pride filled post than the first draft.  This whole post started because of a poem of sorts i was about to post.  So, here's what I originally intended to post.

The soft glow of a screen
Casting light on my body
clicking, looking, for my sexual cuisine
"She's young, hopefully legal" barely 18

I stare at her breast
I don't know her name
I watch her undress
and part of her i claim

One becomes one-hundred nameless faces
while i was clicking, searching for another high
i think i'll find love in these places
but this is were intimacy comes to die

I don't feel like a man
except when the screen is on
every time i leave i begin to plan
for the next time i'll feel like a man

This is my secret sin
this is my new reality
I isolate myself to see her again
and the rest of my life is a mere formality

Whenever i gaze into the screen
the offer is intimacy without commitment
the cost is my heart becomes a machine
and my soul flickers out of existence

Every night i convince myself actions are without consequence
At most i'm only harming myself
Slowly i quiet my mind
the part of my that knows this truth
Porn and victimization are synonymous