From Living the Dream to Hitting Rock Bottom…Again and Again

My journey towards truth and fulfillment can best be described as a seemingly endless cycle of rise and fall. It was tough, but this is what I’ve learned.

I can trace this all the way back to middle school. This is when the concept of image really started to creep into my life. At this age, all I wanted was to fit in. I was so desperately chasing this desire that I quickly became someone I was never intended to be.

 I became very selfish and self-centered individual. I also began to place my worth in material possessions and the people I associated with. I did whatever they did, acted how they acted, and went along with whatever they said; no matter how uncomfortable I felt about the situation. 

This led me to mistreat people I had known for years and ultimately destroy those relationships for the sake of not feeling alone. Kind of twisted, isn’t it? But I honestly didn’t know any better. All I knew was that the clothes I wore were never good enough, the people around me were “cool” despite how I actually felt about them, and I could never meet the expectations I set for myself.

This mentality followed me into high school. This meant that I was at a new school with a new group of friends, but the story was very similar. This is where the weight of my misguided desires really started to pile on.

I began to feel this overwhelming sense of loneliness. I would make “friends” in an attempt to block out that feeling, but it never felt like any of them truly understood or knew me. In a way, these people were more of a means to an end for me.

This was the beginning of a very vicious cycle in my life. I was increasingly being exposed to the lies of the culture by my friends, my family, and my environment. Couple that with the loneliness and a not-yet-fully-understood desire for love and things spiraled out of control quickly. 

I began to seek fulfillment in the pursuit of relationships that I was not prepared to enter into. I felt that I was somehow less if I was single and the weight of that insecurity often felt unbearable. So when those endeavors failed I clung to momentary pleasures in order to escape that reality. This would eventually evolve into a constant cycle of chasing those little highs, having it fade, and going back again just to avoid dealing with my situation.

This clearly wasn’t healthy, I thought this was where genuine happiness was found. That was up until the point where I began the process of Confirmation. Part of our formation required us to attend several retreats and, despite feeling forced to attend, I am now able to see just how pivotal those encounters were.

I witnessed this genuine joy, both from missionaries that we invited to our parish and my parish’s youth leaders, and realized that what I had been searching for was something that they possessed. I became invested, despite not fully understanding where that joy came from, and soon after even volunteered as a youth leader myself. Now I wish this could have been the end of the story, but it wasn’t.

During the first two years of my college career I continued to struggle; specifically with purity. The wounds of my past kept reappearing and I began to live what seemed like a double life. I entered into two problematic relationships consecutively during that time and, when the dust settled, I felt so broken and confused. However, it was through that brokenness that God was finally able to get through to me.

I felt like I had hit rock bottom. Then I was introduced to the Theology of the Body and fell in love. I developed a deeper understanding of the virtue of chastity and a genuine desire to love authentically. I began the process of healing and that has led me here. 

You see, chastity helped me break the cycle. It helped me take control of my desires and direct them towards that authentic love that I had been yearning for. Am I perfect? Not even close. But chastity offers me an opportunity to live a life of greatness and I recognize that in order to do that I must choose to be a man of integrity over the comfort that the culture offers.