Kintsugi - The Art of Personal Reconstruction

In this episode, I bring the first Season of 'Personal Reconstruction' to a close.

Progression is slow, and steady. The wound must remain in a non-agitated state for the duration of it's healing. So to our minds, bodies, and emotions need to be in a kind of stasis in order to heal properly. This episode talks about the early stages of recovering from the relapse bubble and gives a semi-roadmap for the next couple of weeks/months leading into Season 2.

Talking about staying on task, despite having failed a couple of times. A lot changed when I realized I had to keep moving forward, especially if I felt the cause was justified. I learned what I needed to stick with and what to let go of, and most importantly the realization that failing at something did not mean the end of working at doing a better job of it. There also is a counterpoint to this, some things are not meant to be overcome, but rather, avoided. Cultivating this wisdom has been a huge part of what I've learned on this journey. We may not always get it right, but we can always orient ourselves and give it our best shot. Sometimes the goal is to progress, not to be perfect.

This is a three part episode with an overarching theme of passing through a time period of recurring relapses, often referred to as the bubble. It's partly a commentary (from the present), a documentation of 'state-of-mind' (the past - Sept 2020), a positively reflective look at what happened and finally orientation towards the future and what it holds.

This was a difficult and emotionally wrangling one to put up, nonetheless, I thought it was worth doing, if nothing else but for what we can gain from watching perseverance through a cycle of rising and falling. One of the many truths in life is that we will all face forms of adversity at various points in our lives, whether they are at ours, or at the hands of others and as the saying goes; Its not how many times you fall, its how many times you get up. You can't trust claims to perfection, there is always something disingenuous about them you can, however, trust commitment to a goal ‘regardless’ of circumstance. Progress, not Perfection.

This is a bit of a hybrid series; one part documenting the other side of the struggle - the euphoric 'I think I just beat it' side, and the other talking a little bit more about the series and some of the places I want to take thing. There is also a saying - "Pride goes before a fall", in this case "Euphoria goes before a fall".

This is a shorter episode and the first of a two-part, post-introduction series. It's been a few days since the recording of episode 5, and though unexpected. I began to experience the first signs of 'withdrawal', at least knowing and understanding whats going on, I document my experience of the struggle, the conflicting urges and the understanding that no matter what transpired afterward, there would be another episode after this.

In this episode, I talk about my efforts to turn things around and how they failed. Sometimes, they just didn't work, or I didn't have the right mindset at the time. I did with each avenue I 'walked' down, learn something new that helped in the long term. Some of those things were new habits, but more profoundly - a shift in perspective and an embrace of the quiet. Despite the struggle of wrestling myself away from using porn, I found ways and tools to improve myself and my experience. I set out on a different path, the one that has led me here, to you.

In this episode (just a few hours after the 'act') I get into some of the darker experiences I had with porn and my attempts to cover up the behaviors I engaged in. I talk about the qualia of that experience and the activities I engaged in that facilitated that. While giving more context to some of the events, the series begins to focus in more detail the nature of what fueled my decision and yearning for an alternate set of experience.

We often lose track of things as we go about our daily existence, then one day, we wake up and we ask ourselves "How did 'we' get here?". In this episode, I provide more context with oriented towards the question - How did I get here?