A Long Walk Back Home

I will be walking a very old pilgrimage route. This is a route that has been trodden millions of times over by hungry, weary, thirsty souls throughout millennia. The root word of pilgrimage is one seeking to travel to a holy land for penance, to fulfill a vow or to receive spiritual benefit. I would certainly put myself in the latter category, though I know not whether I can completely be sure I don’t fall into the others as well.

This brings me to a critical point that I have been striving to overcome and that is at the heart of my desire to seek the solace, solitude and hopefully beneficent connection to be found on the Santiago De Compostela. Otherwise known as the El Camino or “the Way”.

I have been wayward. A prodigal son. I have spent much of my early life ensconced in hookup culture and without much purpose. Though I have maintained a good deal of discipline and self-love in the way of reading, writing, healthy habits and pursuing my passion – I have also allowed a good deal of time in my life to pass in what I don’t believe can be described other than sin.

I don’t mean this in the sense that I have failed to follow some outward law that was prescribed to me. I have bucked some of the social morays that permeate our culture, like finishing my bachelor's degree. No, what I mean is in the biblical sense, and in the realest sense of the word, I have failed to love God with my “all my heart and all my soul and all my mind”.

I have been given tremendous gifts, especially early on in life. Through a combination of hubris, resentment, disbelief, foolishness, and naivety; I have made many negative decisions. I have not trusted God fully, so often keeping him at a distance or half out of my life.

The primary way I have acted fundamentally from naivety, selfishness and resentment has been through sex. Hookups, porn, masturbation, polyamory, leading people on.

Now, there is room in life for these things to some extent in other people's lives. I am not condemning them categorically, though I believe through my own experience and persuasive argument that ones life is vastly better without them.

The crux of it for me is that there is a great deal of my life that lay untapped as I pursued these things; sank my time, energy and efforts into them. And necessarily I did not pursue the deepest direction that I had in been given in my life.

Chief of which was a vision to recreate universities in a way where they could be reborn. I didn’t believe that I could do this. I was angry and felt unprepared. I felt arrogant, that my ego was massively inflated and that in order to come back down to earth I needed to just do the normal things. Finish school, get a good job, find a girlfriend, make her my wife, have kids, and on and on...

Yet, I failed in that. There's always been a part of me that has been ambitious or felt that 'normal' life wasn't meant for me. So I felt I really just needed to get rich as soon as possible in a way that aligns with my ethics, leaving this world to rot. Isolating myself somewhere. Or at least insulating myself from it as much as possible.

That has been the ultimate goal running in the background of my life. For a long time I have been very angry and very afraid; pent up in the negative experiences and concomitant emotions and mindsets from my past. I didn’t recognize that these forces within me were contrary to the desire to flourish and align with God’s will. To love God and do the things I needed to do to align with that. So I constantly acted out of a split internal psyche. I have been constantly in the midst of an internal civil war.

And now, over the last two years or so that war has begun to come to a close. The reality of my internal being was sowing bitter fruits in the real world.

An unintended pregnancy led to an abortion that was the worst pain in my life. An endless cycle of hookups had led me to intercourse and interaction with people whom I began to not even like, let alone want to be with long term. I slowly witnessed myself become better and more comfortable with lying to myself and others, often so subtly that I didn't even notice it myself.

The real culmination was attempting to turn over a new leaf and get into a serious relationship, putting all the behavior I had been ashamed of behind me. Yet the problem was I was deeply ambivalent about this behavior.

Was I just too ashamed and guilty to do what I really wanted? Was I still too young to settle down? Was I denying myself pleasure that could be so easily had, especially in today's hookup culture?

So, despite getting into relationships, I found myself conflicted. On one hand, I poured my heart out to a girl who seemed to be just as wounded and desperate for a relationship as me. On the other hand, I felt terrified of the developing intimacy and commitment. The relationship was totally rushed and fundamentally built on two very wounded and desperate people's need to escape into each other.

And so, I confessed to cheating. Though it was a soft cheat – I downloaded a dating app and was matching with and chatting with girls – it was a cheat because we had begun to be monogamous.

Additionally, it was more ambiguous because we never had a conversation about monogamy, we just acted like this would be the one. No forthright, honest conversations about what a real, lasting relationship would look like.

To top it all off, we had met the night I had drunkenly made out with her best friend at a bar, when she was very depressed and anxious about some workplace drama. Not an auspicious start. And lo and behold, it led to a heartbreaking ending.

So she kicked me out of her apartment on Valentine's Day. Yet another notch in my generally disastrous record with women and committed relationships. Yet such are the consequences when houses are built on foundations of sand.

The pain was horrible and I started a ‘sex’ based 12 step program not long after. I recognized that the symptoms of porn and chronic dating app use were at least important places to start if I was going to get a handle on the deeper issue of my dire lack of being able to be in a healthy relationship.

So I have begun to improve. I have ceased masturbating and watching porn for long periods. I have dramatically reduced my hookups and use of dating apps. They’ve not been zero. But now, they need to be. As I am genuinely in desperate need of turning over that new leaf fully.

I’m 27 and I need to change. No more sitting on the fence, hedging my bets, always choosing the safest route of least resistance. I need to grow up and be the man that I have the potential to be. Time to meet that potential with open arms and a courageous heart. Time to find forgiveness and let go of the past.

I have begun to learn how to treat myself as a best friend, to learn to love myself again. This is something that I think may be prerequisite or at least concomitant with loving God with my whole heart, soul and mind. Love myself the way he would love me. I need to live in that fully more and more everyday, every moment.

This is why I will be walking the “El Camino”, so I can find my way, like millions before me for over a thousand years.

Over the next several weeks I will write more on the ways I have failed and what I have learned. Where I’ve succeeded and where I’ve not gone far enough. I’ll tell more of my story and write my hopes for the future. All the while I'll share about the route I’ll walk; hoping to be changed by the landscape, people and time I spend with myself and God along The Way.