Joy: Diary of a Sex Addict

The Joy Diary: Now an Ebook

2011-07-14T20:16:00.001-07:00

Joy: Diary of a Sex Addict, is now an ebook and is available for Kindle.

Testing, testing

2011-06-27T21:56:00.000-07:00

Is anyone still there? It's been five years to the week since I last posted. A lot can happen in five years. A whole lot of sturm and drang. But I'm still here. Some things have turned out better than might have been expected, some things worse.

How does one catch up after an absence of five years? How does one begin to reconstruct such a large chunk of the past? One minor history, in a sea of histories. The Internet is so much bigger now than it was when I first started this blog in 2005, the holes down which Alice might fall so vast and labyrinthine, the recorded histories of individual lives piling up to rival the towers of Babel. One increasingly needs a compass simply to navigate the day.

I am back, but what can I say to sum up the last five years? Some sweeping statement of lessons learned. I'd like to offer you that, but I don't have it. I can't find the words.

in search of a starting point

2006-06-13T06:54:00.000-07:00

To all things there is a beginning.

At times I've attempted to remember the exact point at which my addiction made itself known. Is there an event to which it can be traced, a precise moment in time when I started down the path of sexual addiction that would come to govern my life?

I am sixteen years old, a mall parking lot in Chattanooga, TN. I'm in town visiting relatives. We've done all those Tennessee things--the Chattanooga Choo-Choo, for example. Ruby Falls. Rock City. An incline railway to the top of Lookout Mountain. I am bored, bored, bored. The cousins and I have been released from the adults for the evening. We have been sent off to find our own entertainment while the adults dine at some fancy restaurant.

The cousins and I go to a movie. There are two of them-a boy, seventeen, a girl fifteen. The movie theater is located in a mall. We arrive early and decide to kill some time at Banana Republic. This is back when Banana Republic had a jungle theme, tropical plants everywhere and pants in khaki and olive. There's a boy working there, all done up in jungle gear. He looks like a high school football player sentenced to summer employment at the mall. I've never gone in for the bulkier jocks, with their overblown muscles and underdeveloped minds, but something about this guy immediately gets to me. Looking back, I can't remember exactly what it was. Did he have beautiful eyes, nice hair, exceptionally good manners?

I can't recall. I only remember that he came over to the rack where I was trying on belts (I wasn't intending to purchase, as a single belt would have put a serious dent in my meager babysitting income). Without saying a word to me he took a woven leather belt and slid it around my waist, working it under the beltloops of my jeans, so that, at one point, we stood as if in a one-sided embrace, with his arms around my waist, mine straight at my sides, our faces so close we could have kissed.

Then he buckled the thing. In retrospect, I'm rather amazed by him still. How does a boy of that tender age acquire such confidence, such skill in the art of seduction?

He wanted to know where I was going. To the movies, I said. He was getting off work, wanted to know if he could join me. Of course, I said. I told my cousins I'd meet them at the theater. They looked at each other, concerned, as if they hadn't planned for this possibility. What to do with the wayward cousin visiting from afar (well, not so afar)? Did they have some responsibility for my virtue? I guess they decided they didn't, because they agreed to meet me later.

Banana Republic boy and I never made it to the theater. We went to his car instead, in the parking lot of the mall. No fuss or negotiation, straight to the backseat. It was one of those old Ford Broncos, I think, where you had to work just to get up into the seat. He doesn't even start with my shirt, the way most boys his age do--the way, in fact, every boy I've known up to this point has done. No, he goes straight for the zipper of my jeans, I can feel his hand tugging down there--jeans to the knees, followed by underwear--but this is the eighties, the jeans are tight, they must come all the way off. So then he's kneeling in the back seat, pulling off my shoes, yanking at my jeans until they're all the way off, and he's still wearing his shirt, and I'm still wearing mine.

It's summer, the sun stays up late, we are not covered by darkness as we fuck in the back of his Ford Bronco, fucking where anyone can see us, making all sorts of noise. And I love it and hate it at the same time. It hurts but I don't want it to stop. And I'm wondering what happened, how I got here, how at one minute I was shopping at Banana Republic and the next minute I'm fucking a stranger in the parking lot.

That was the beginning, I think. Of a whirlwind, a firestorm, and grand and terrible thing.

Because if you think sex addiction is sexy, here's one thing you may not realize: it runs your life. Eventually it ruins it. And yet, there's that moment in the back seat of a car or in some grimy bathroom or in the woods or at the bar or wherever--that moment when it feels like exactly what you need.

May 10: Time & Boris

2005-06-29T05:33:00.000-07:00

For the married sex addict, time is always the enemy. No lazy weekends at the beach, no cozy cabins in the woods. Sex always happens on the fly, somehwere between morning coffee and late-night TV with the husband. One always has the sense that the clock is about to strike the midnight hour and the coachman is going to turn into a mouse. Maybe this works out fine for the male sex addict, but for a woman, whose best orgasms generally take more than three minutes to achieve, the speed that covert sex addiction requires is a definite downer.

Take *Boris*, whom I met two weeks ago at a Saturday afternoon cocktail party. The party was hosted by mutual friends and my husband was at work, so I was representing the family. The party began at 4:00, and at 7:00 I had to meet said husband downtown for dinner with one of his colleages and the colleague's wife (she's a stay-at-home mom, although "stay at home" seems like a misnomer, since she's usually shopping or doing Bikram yoga while the nanny watches the tots).

I got to the party at 4:30, and what with all the people I had to greet it took half an hour to make my way over to Boris, my pick of the evening, a tall fellow with enormous hands and a wide face that looked vaguely Russian. Indeed, when I got around to introducing myself beside the cheese tray, it turned out Boris had an accent and a one-semester research fellowship at a local university. Upside: a preconceived notion about the general sluttiness of American women, which would make it easy to get down to business. Downside: no wife or girlfriend in the country, which meant he could afford to be indiscreet.

It was 6:15 by the time Boris and I got to his apartment, a cramped studio with a gorgeous view of the Golden Gate bridge and not a single item of decoration on the walls. Which gave us approximately twelve minutes to do our thing before I had to rush off to meet the husband--five minutes of which would need to be spent showering Boris off of me, brushing my hair, and dressing. Fortunately, Boris was not one for gentle seductions. He whipped his pants off with such alacrity I suspected there must be velcro somewhere, whipped my dress off with equal dexterity, ordered me onto my hands and knees on the bed, and entered me without so much as a "Is this direction all right with you?"

This fellow was no Jeremy. I didn't come. But there was some satisfaction in feeling him bucking behind me, whispering indecipherable Russian obsenities (or perhaps he was pledging his everlasting love--how could I know?), his voice getting louder and deeper as his dick swelled inside me and he exploded. When he was done, he collapsed on top of me rather than pulling out, and there I lay, suffocating on his scratchy sheets, covered in his sweat and trying unsuccessfully to get a glimpse of his watch. I thought of my husband gathering up his things at work, stepping into a cab with the clients, making their leisurely way across town to the hip French restaurant. I knew my husband was unlikely to notice a thing--but what of his client and the wife? Might they, in their observant objectivity, pick up some lingering scent of Boris that my quick shower could not dispel?

May 5 - About This Blog

2005-06-29T05:21:00.000-07:00

Thursday, May 05, 2005

Let's get one thing straight. I will not be naming names. I'm not interested in ruining anyone's life, least of all my own. This blog is about one woman's unlikely journey into the abyss of sex addiction. Perhaps abyss is too strong a word. There are days when addiction feels like an overwhelming darkness from which I will never emerge, and days when sex is the only thing that keeps me going. Addiction is both friend and enemy, both comfort and pain.

My initial title for this blog was SHAME. Then I realized that JOY might be a more appropriate title. The truth is, sex brings me great pleasure, a kind of mind-blowing bliss I can find nowhere else. But it also brings me, on rare occasions, to the brink of suicide (I've peered over the edge, but have no desire to actually go there). As with any addiction, mine is self-destructive. But it is also, in many ways, restorative. More on that later.

For the moment let me just say that I am 34 years old, married, self-employed, the resident of a smallish city. If you were to see me on the street, you would not think anything was amiss. I do not have the gaunt, hollow-eyed look one might associate with addiction. My clothes are modest and clean, my hair is always combed, my shoes are, for the most part, sensible. I read books and go to movies and take public transportation. I eat well and do not overindulge in drink. I rarely do drugs.

In short, I am an average woman with an above-average desire, a desire which sometimes plays out in dangerous ways. I don't expect this blog to cure me. I don't expect it to cure anyone else. This is neither an exercise in self-help nor an experiment in public service. This is simply my story.