What falling for a drug addict was like

Back to blogging for the first time since early this year, having just witnessed the half-anniversary mark of the Trump presidency and also undergoing a major personal crisis of faith, it is time to turn to my deep Eastern roots for a security and stability that is no longer available to the citizens of the West who continue to live by Western values.

I fell in love with a beautiful Mexican-Salvadorean girl, Kasandra Martinez, back in June and July. She was very much an incarnation of everything that's both seductively attractive yet ultimately completely self-destructive about the so-called "free world", i.e. the Western Hemisphere.

Fashioning herself as a "free spirit", this 24-year-old marijuana addict was in fact a total slave to her own vanity - a vanity so huge that it blinded her to even realizing its existence. In the short time I got to know this very troubled Latina - a confused bisexual on top of being a substance junkie (not just pot but also smoke, drink, and other drugs) - I saw the utterly horrible nature of addiction of any kind: the addict herself would never even admit it was a problem.

And that's the state of Western, led by American, culture nowadays: we are nothing less than a whole society of junkies - a race of stupefied idiots whose only priority in life is to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. We're so absolutely incapable of dealing with the rough storm that is life that we'd rather withdraw into a delusion of our own making that ends up cutting our bonds with the very reality of the world itself - even as it convinces us that we're making the moral and correct choice both for ourselves and for those around us.

So that's Kasandra for you, in a nutshell: a tragic beauty, fooled ultimately by nothing other than her own self-inflated ego and complete self-centeredness that, as I mentioned, is so absolute that she couldn't possibly even see it.

Now of course, because I had fallen in love with her, it was personally very difficult for me to overcome the sense of guilt that I'd passed such severe judgment on her right to her face: it was nothing less than a verbal spanking that parents and teachers traditionally have the obligation to impose on their unruly children (though sometimes rightly accompanied with the physical one as well), only tainted by my own fleshly desire for the girl. And true, behind every addict is a deep suffering and pain - quite possibly even long-buried traumas - that renders any thought of life without the object(s) of addiction literally unbearable; in this I have regretted not conveying to Kasandra a deeper understanding of the roots of her destructive behavior and why it's so hard for her to stop.

Yet in the end, for every single one of us, we are what we are - "how" we got to be what we are is of little practical relevance in terms of actually changing what we are into something better, both for ourselves and those we love.

I may have suffered greatly at the hands of a neurotic and eventually schizophrenic mother who basically left home for the madhouse when I was 8, and this may have been the origin of my 14-year addiction to masturbation; but when the time came to own that particular grave habitual sin and cut with its destructive effects on my real life (especially how it reduced women and girls to sexual objects to be manipulated for me), that could never have been in the least an excuse to go somewhat easier or slower on myself.

I still love Kasandra, in fact. Perhaps I saw much of myself in her, notwithstanding the big age gap (12 years older); there was something more than just the physical attraction, but in the spiritual dimension I sensed a special kindred independence of character bordering on eccentric arrogance that I've grudgingly come to acknowledge is my personal hallmark, and a longing there in her for discovering what is true amidst a life and a world of such confusion. She wouldn't have been responsive to the point of being so open and vulnerable with me about her problems if she hadn't herself sensed I could be of some genuine help in her life - and no matter how much an addict might act or say otherwise, deep down they simply can't ultimately deny that their addiction is a source of tremendous suffering that they'd rather do away with. It's just that the pain of deliberately denying oneself one's longstanding source of consolation - the only coping mechanism against going crazy outright - is just too much at first.

So Kasandra, if you're out there somewhere, I'll say again unequivocally that I love you; more deeply and purely now than ever. You will probably be in my prayers for a good while; if only my prayers and penances could actually help it, you'll eventually be clean no matter how long and tortuous a process that is. That is the hope of my life, if even a secret and hidden one. In your healing and renewal as a woman bearing the image of God in its full truth and beauty, I hope and long for the broader restoration of an entire world - the West - in the opening decades of this third millennium.