Unsticking from Fantasy
Discomfort as a Path Forward
I am a child of the age of fantasy. Born in the 80s, I grew up with a controller in my hand. I was saving Princess Peach around the same time I started talking in sentences. I practiced jump kicks off the couch and took Taekwondo lessons to be like my heroes, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Sometimes when I was alone, I’d tense my whole body, making the veins bulge from my neck, as I tried to activate my mutant powers. I longed to move things with my mind like the leader of the X-Men, Professor X.
As my first friendships were forming in elementary school, video games became a social glue. Whose house we played at depended on what friend had which video games and how long their parents would let us play. Sometimes a group of us would migrate from one house to the next trying to maximize our game time: Kid Chameleon at Sarah’s, MadMaze at John’s, then to Kyle’s place for Mortal Kombat (his parents were cool like that).
Through middle school, so many fiction worlds became formative. Bart Simpson was my basis for cool, while Ned Flanders, the Jesus-freak neighbor, was the epitome of lame. Beavis and Butt-Head could be emulated for a laugh. Cast members on The Real World and Road Rules – pioneers of reality TV – taught lessons on relationships and how to attract girls.
Within months of having my driver’s license, I’d discovered new adventures in the online world of EverQuest, and instead of exploring the real world in my Toyota Corolla, I often preferred to fight across the planet of Norrath as a pudgy troll shaman. Outside of Norrath, hanging out with friends usually meant watching, playing, or talking about some other game or fantasy world. With anime, we could jump from universe to universe – from the quirky desert dystopia of Trigun to the gritty space noir cities of Cowboy Bebop to the epic outer space war involving giant mechs in Gundam Wing. There were so many worlds to learn about.
In college I found like-minded gamers in the “Honors House” – a fraternity house converted into a home for honors students after a hazing incident had broken a pledge’s neck. There we would set up an umbilicus of LAN cables down hallways and across common areas to play Halo and StarCraft, swearing at and heckling one another across the house. When I moved into an apartment, gaming became more solitary, and my grades suffered through a few semesters of World of Warcraft. After I graduated, I went back to the game, regularly playing till 2:00 in the morning and going to work at 6:00 the next day. I loved the game in the evening and hated it as I got ready for work, but for the most part I savored the fantasy and the escape.
Oblivious to the fact at the time, I hated quiet, stillness, and boredom. I had learned as a kid that the TV could rid me of these perceived ills, so I left it on as much as I was allowed. Soon it was not only assuaging the discomfort of boredom but any negative feeling I had. Whenever I had a rough day at school, my thoughts turned to what show or game was waiting for me at home. When I had a fight with a friend or my parents, I’d retreat to my games. After breaking my arm in middle school, I set myself up on a pile of pillows in front of the TV for weeks, playing a roleplaying game to serve as a constant distraction from the pain. I was unconsciously cementing a habit in which I looked for pleasure any time I felt discomfort.
In pornography I found a more potent anesthetic. My fifth-grade year I saw pornography for the first time at a friend’s house. We were bored of watching cartoons and he showed me what he had discovered on channel 1. The images were mostly-scrambled, but if you waited, they would become unscrambled for a moment or two, enough that you could see the bodies beneath the skewed lines. I went home and found that I had the same channel as my friend.
That same year, America Online (AOL) was growing in popularity, and my family adopted the new technology along with millions of other households. I was fascinated by the different areas that it had to explore, especially the chat rooms, where I could go and talk with others on topics like comic books. I grew curious after seeing some of the chat rooms marked as private and adults only. It wasn’t long before I had figured out how to message other members to get invited into these rooms where I learned about their email “subs” (short for subscriptions). All I had to do was type “subscribe me” in the chat to be added to massive email chains in which other members sent out every form of pornography.
The Penthouse magazines that got passed around in Boy Scouts were relatively toothless compared to what I’d seen by 6th grade on channel 1 and AOL. In early high school I ordered a couple pay-per-view movies (which I later got in trouble for). Within a month of turning 18, I went to the XXX store that was on my way home from school. The shame in being seen at the store and potential risk of being recognized by someone I knew, made it something that I only tried one other time. As soon as I had my own bank statements, I subscribed to porn websites for a time. Then came the era of free porn sites modeled after YouTube. Barriers like shame and money were now completely removed, and I became more hooked than ever.
I share all this not because I think my life was unusual, but because I think that for countless of my generation, it was typical. From a young age, with the click of button, I was able to avoid the discomforts of boredom, loneliness, sadness, rejection, and anxiety. Why would a kid choose to feel discomfort if they could turn on the television or computer and escape instead? These forms of media felt like entertainment, but they were so much more. They were vending machines which would take my negative emotions and spit out a trinket – a fun story or entertaining game to distract me from every little pain.
As my frontal cortex (responsible for decision making, reasoning, and self-control) was developing, I was soaking in these super stimuli and growing used to the instant gratification of video games, television shows, and pornography. Even when those things were a detriment, I would choose them like a rat pushing the feed button. I became opportunistic with respect to getting as much as I could, looking for chances when I could sneak in a few minutes of video games or stay up late when my parents were asleep so I could watch pornography. These patterns formed when I was a child, unaware of the heavy burden they would become in adulthood.
The problem with rejecting my negative emotions was that they were never really gone, only staved off for a time. In pushing away every discomfort, whether it was boredom, pain, or rejection, I never saw it as a motivator to learn and mature. I stunted myself emotionally by never learning to tolerate them. If I didn’t keep feeding the machine, the moment there was any quiet and stillness, it would regurgitate the negative emotions that I’d fed to it. The game was to keep feeding the machine and never slow down.
In college, alcohol added a new layer to the fantasy. As someone with social anxiety, alcohol became an easy fix for me to be more social and less anxious. It meant I had a better time doing what I thought all college kids were supposed to be doing: partying. I used it as a crutch to become someone I thought I liked better and started to believe it made every activity less stressful and more fun. And that meant everything - from video games, to going to movies, even doing homework.
Television, video games, pornography, alcohol – they grew to complement each other so well. They kept things from getting too boring and repetitive over the years. They gave ways to escape the present, to stay stuck in time, and to try to go back, chasing the highs of those first experiences.
Looking back, it’s no surprise that the practice of my faith diminished during my time in college. I started Freshman year going to Mass on Sundays and tried out an event or two at the Neumann Center, but I saw it as more of a place to meet girls than to worship. I started missing Mass, choosing instead to go out to eat with friends or play video games. Eventually I stopped going to the Neumann Center altogether because I didn’t want the kids that went to Mass every week to see that I wasn’t perfect. The cathedral was fifteen minutes away, which I happily drove to maintain anonymity. Much like why I stopped going into the XXX store, my fear of being found out kept me from attending the Neumann Center. I was Catholic in how I identified but, outside of church, no one would have known it. My reasons for attending were so that my parents wouldn’t nag me and so that I could try to do just enough to avoid Hell. The funny thing is that during this whole time that I’m skating away from God, I kept telling myself how good of a Christian I was and how I had such strong faith. My time at a well-regarded Catholic high school had fed my pride. As long as I saw faith as an intellectual pursuit, I could keep telling myself I was great at it. I tried to use the little education I had as armor to guard against the shame I felt for living a life of duplicity.
Grace was not something I understood or sought. I treated my spirituality like an attribute in one of the roleplaying games I played: I had to level up my character to progress. I thought I could wait on focusing on my relationship with God, anticipating that I would come back to God at some hazy point in the future and pick up right where I had left off. It didn’t become clearer until I went back, that what little faith I had had atrophied. My level 10 character was back to level 1.
It wasn’t long before I was thinking more like everyone else on campus, but in my mind, I was evolving into a new, better kind of Christian - a Christian with modern sensibilities, informed by progress. What did early Christians, or even Christians of a century ago, know in comparison to modern man, who sent information at the speed of light? I was a sponge, thirsty for ideas that might reconcile my conscience with what I wanted to do. I desired a new world view that no longer challenged me to grow in virtue. Personal growth became reduced to how much stuff I knew and how much money I could earn. When I started dating, I bent easily to what girlfriends believed and to my feelings.
College was fun and, between classes and extracurriculars, I kept my days filled, providing plenty of excuses to avoid God. But as I tried to ignore Him, there were times where He used shame to challenge me. On occasion, moments of painful clarity broke through and began to erode my worldview. They were moments that were as if the filter through which I saw the world had been removed, and a mirror held up to me as a voice shouted, “Would you look at yourself? What are you doing?”
The first of these moments happened when I was a junior in college, after I’d started sleeping over at a new girlfriend’s apartment. The relationship was a month or so old and we’d started having sex. Romantic that I was, I told myself that she was the one and we were in love. This proved convenient because as part of my modern Christian views I had decided that love made sex sinless as long as it was within a committed relationship. I remember one night going back to my apartment, probably no more than an hour after we’d had sex. I went into my room, looked at my computer, and got a sudden urge to look at pornography and masturbate. After having done it, I remembered thinking, “I’m in a relationship with someone I love. I’m not supposed to need this anymore.” Up to that point, I’d told myself that sex in a relationship and pornography and masturbation scratched the same itch. I’d convinced myself that when I was in a relationship, it would be easy to stop looking at pornography. After that night, I could no longer pretend that that was the case. I was confronted with a reality that I didn’t understand, but at the time, I didn’t want to understand it, because it might have challenged my worldview which gave me the license to be a Christian without a Cross.
This girlfriend would go on to be wife, not because I loved her in any real sense, but because I equated love and sex. I married her not because I thought we complimented each other or held similar views or goals in life, but because I thought my world view was the true one and I believed I could convince her that she would be happy stepping into the shoes of the wife in my fantasy. I didn’t marry her because I felt she was the person that God intended for me, but because I wanted to possess her out of fear that she might be happy with someone else. I was living in the prison of myself, wanting a wife to take up residence with me there.
In the years leading up to engagement and marriage and then for the first few years of married life, I was deeply committed to the views I’d formed in college. I made my happiness my goal and chased pleasure after pleasure telling myself that I’d better get my fill while I’m young, because someday I was going back to God to live by His rules so that I could get to Heaven. I wanted to believe that I could choose the moment of my return to God as His prodigal son. I accepted anything that would affirm my beliefs and avoided anything which might challenge them. But God sent more moments that would challenge my false beliefs.
The next of these happened when I was in graduate school. My class was fairly small, about forty students, and we all got to know each other pretty well. We’d regularly get together for drinks at bars or at one of the student’s houses. One night I was giving some classmates a ride over to a mutual friend’s house. I had become pretty close with two of the friends but the third was a classmate named Emily whom I didn’t know as well. She didn’t go out as much as many of my other classmates, and I’d heard it was because she spent much of her free time at her apartment on the phone with her long-distance boyfriend. On the drive to our mutual friend’s house, I stopped to get gas. My two friends went into the gas station to get snacks and Emily stood out talking with me as I pumped gas. She was attractive, the type of looks and figure that I’d be drawn to if I saw her on a porn site. It was cold out, and she was in a tank top and had goosebumps. As we talked, I kept trying to steal glances of her body. I hardly paid attention to whatever it was that we were talking about. I just kept wondering about her boyfriend and whether or not she was happy with him. I thought that I could make her happier, if only she knew that. And for a moment in my imagination, we were a beautiful, happy couple. Then I remembered that I’d moved across the country to be with my long-term girlfriend whom I was convinced I was going to marry. I was stung by my conscience and just stood there thinking, “What kind of partner am I?” I never dared to discuss it with anyone.
A couple years later, I had been married for about six months and hope had died that quitting pornography would be easier as a married man. If anything, I was looking just as much in secret and feeling worse about my inability to quit. And then one summer day during my commute home, I had yet another moment when I was shown my own baseness.
I had stopped at a stoplight next to a park close to my home when a gorgeous runner jogged into the crosswalk in front of my car, wearing a sports bra and yoga shorts. My adrenaline kicked in and time slowed. My eyes fixed on her longingly. I was busy memorizing every detail of her body in that short moment. Similar to the experience with Emily, I started to wonder if this woman had a boyfriend and if he made her happy. I knew I could make her happy if she would just look over at me: then she would be in thrall to me. I wanted so much to have the same effect on her as she had on me. I pictured the two of us together and didn’t want the moment to end. The stoplight turned green, and I was wrenched out of the fantasy. I began to drive, remembering that I was married. Were other guys like this?
I remember finding this experience particularly disturbing, because the womanizer side of me that I kept under wraps and only intended to let out when I was looking at pornography was hijacking my brain in public where I might get caught. I always thought I could keep that side of me a secret – that Jekyll could control Hyde. It was becoming clear that my thoughts in the dark were coming out in the light. I had become like the Pharisees whom Jesus likened to cups that were cleansed on the outside but filthy on the inside (Mt 23: 25-26). I had been a hypocrite, thinking one way and acting another. And I had been okay with that as long as no one could see the filth inside. So I was troubled when my clean outer façade was in jeopardy and that I might be found out.
Beyond that, what really bothered was that I had this craving to throw away my personhood. I found myself wanting to be objectified by this stranger. I wanted my own warped values to be reflected back on me and to make her feel the same attraction towards me as I felt towards her. Part of me wanted to throw my relationship away and to be less human, more animal. I didn’t understand everything that I was feeling at the time, but I know I didn’t want to keep going down that path. The problem was that I also didn’t want to give up pornography.
In these moments, I was beginning to understand that the years I’d spent looking at pornography had conditioned me to use others without reservation. It came naturally for me to take what I wanted without regard to another’s personhood or their dignity. For over a decade, I had tried to rationalize that there was nothing wrong with pornography, and I would have preferred to go on living as though that were the case. I likely would have done so had it not been for this fear of being found out. Fear was the primary motivation for me to take the first steps to figure out what was going on with me. It was starting to become clear that I couldn’t compartmentalize these aspects of my life any more. There was no hidden life and public life. All was one. I was the same broken person no matter how much I tried to control things or hide aspects of myself. Having the clarity to see my actions for what they were, fearing someone would discover me, and being disturbed enough to feel I to needed to change, that was all grace. It was uncomfortable, but it was a gift, because it helped me “unstick” and to begin addressing some of the things that were blocking me from having a relationship with God.
Jesus is the divine physician and he can heal me, but more than healing me, he desires a relationship with me. That relationship cannot be built on fantasy. If I approach Jesus as a sick person claiming to be healthy, or as someone who needs God but already has God figured out, how can I hope to have an honest relationship? An addict has to admit that they have a problem before they can be helped. I needed to see the truth that I was a mess before I could start recovering.
Unrestrained self-comfort had led me to a life stuck in fantasy. It seems fitting that God would use a little discomfort – seeing the truth of who I was, a sinner – to lead me back to Him.