The price we pay

Smoking 2 packs a day for a year? $4,380.

Liver transplant due to alcoholism? $300,000

Costs of a pornography addiction?   

When trying to convince a smoker to quit smoking, one could use a variety of methods. Usually friends and doctors try and convince them to quit primarily for health reasons. It is common knowledge that smoking increases your risk for a great number of cancers and other diseases. Another reason people try to get them to quit is financial reason. We talk about how much money a smoker would save if they would quit. If we do an average of $6/pack for a person who smokes 2 packs/day, they would save $365/month – that’s $4,380/year! That’s a pretty penny. Pretty much a nice car payment. Then you have the money they will eventually spend on health problems related to smoking, which is exponentially higher. In addition, to health and finances, there are also social and emotional consequences that I imagine a person addicted to nicotine would feel (as well as a variety of others I haven’t thought of). Oh, and it is indicated as a factor in killing nearly 500,000 people per year in America alone.

Yet, despite these very obvious costs of smoking the cancer sticks (as grandpa calls them), almost 20% of Americans smoke. A doctor could look a nicotine addict straight in the eye and tell them, “If you do not quit, you will die” and there would still be many that go home and light it up.

It sounds all too familiar to me. I remember thinking/writing down lists of things that my addiction was costing me. And yet no matter how many times I went over that list I still acted out for years.

Well, now that I’m working my way through recovery I can tell the price that I paid and continue to pay because of my choices regarding addiction.  The costs of pornography indulgence are unfortunately unquantifiable and much more valuable than money, and the damage cannot be fixed by any physical transplant, but a spiritual transplant of God’s will into our souls.

I wanted to make a quick list here in no particular order, so I can remember what it cost me, and so I can tell others what it will cost them. (Note: when I say “It made me” do something, I do not mean to make myself a victim of circumstance or say it is “its” fault. I fully realize my role in this and that I brought this all on myself through my bad choices.)

1.       Spirituality

a.       It destroyed my faith in God.

b.      It damned me while I participated in it.

c.       I lost out on years of learning and progression that I could have had otherwise.

d.      It made it so I didn’t help others during that time because I could not help myself.

2.       Mentally

a.       I feel like it made my memory worse. It “[blew] a crater in [my] brain.” (Holland)

b.      I got to the point where I didn’t know lie from truth.

c.       It filled my thoughts with filth - it is still a daily battle.

3.       Socially

a.       I have had to relearn how to act around people.

b.      And even want to be around people.

c.       It perverted my thoughts and desires.

d.      It caused me to pursue girls that I didn’t really want to be with

e.      And to be confused about what kind of girl I really wanted.

f.        It made me think it was ok to use the girls I associated with selfishly.

g.       Completely skewed my perception of love.

h.      I have had to break away from my false ideas about love and relearn from scratch what love is and how to express it.

i.         I developed a habit of lying to everyone around me.

j.        So many factors of this have caused major problems between my wife and me. It has brought her more sorrow and pain than I ever imagined I could cause anyone.

k.       It caused me to be insensitive to others.

4.       Personally

a.       It absolutely obliterated any self-confidence I had. I have had to work hard to regain confidence in myself – and I still don’t have it. Also it destroyed others’ confidence in me.

b.      I wasted so much time on it. I can’t get that time back.

c.       I was confused about my identity.

d.      I lived a double life – who I was around others and who I was when I was alone were polar opposites.

e.      It made/makes me depressed.

f.        It made me hate myself.

That’s the price I have paid. Those are just the things off the top of my head. I’m sure it affected me in other ways that I haven’t even realized.Was it worth it? Absolutely, completely, positively, 100% not. Not once. It was never worth it and will never be worth it. It’s not worth one of those consequences and yet it brings on all of them. Recovering from this is worth every effort. 

I wish more than anything I could go back to teenage me and show him this list and let him know what those ‘little’ choices back then would lead to. But instead, I must rebuild. I must regain each of those things one by one. Some of them have come back, some are improving, some are still barely starting to come back, some are still a huge issue.

Wherever they are, I believe that Christ can heal them. I believe that He will for me and for all of us. The atonement is infinite for reasons. I’m one of them.