I often feel helpless in the face of what my godchildren share with me, but despite this I often feel that they help me a lot in my recovery. Unintentionally, they give me ideas that strengthen me. One of those ideas is the importance of service. Speaking hypothetically, I could be thinking about sexual fantasies all day, not working, procrastinating, locked in my mind, as it happened to me when I arrived at the program. Then I blamed the program because I couldn’t work. But the truth is that I could not work because of my sexaholic mind. In the same way I could not work with my life.

Recently I met a new member. He was disgusted because he was not allowed to speak at meetings due to his lack of sobriety. I am like him. I see the world from the bars of lust, so I didn’t understand many things until after gaining sobriety. I arrived with the belief that I have the right to be heard. I also want to change SA in what I thought (with my sexaholic mind) that it should be. I will feel like the center of attention for a moment and that will give me great satisfaction. Then I will leave with the desire to feel that pleasure again. And where will I seek to perpetuate that feeling after leaving the meeting? In lust.

And if I don’t find in the meetings this vain satisfaction because they don’t allow me to speak, then I will give up the meetings, and I will fool myself by saying: “I have a lot of work and SA absorbs me too much.” But the truth is that the origin of my problem is nothing external. It’s me. I always locked myself in the prison of lust, blaming everyone outside my own confinement, wanting to leave but always in my own way. How do I intend to leave? Fleeing through something that gives me pleasure, that increases personal importance, that is, through lust. I always demand pleasure, get attention. Look how I am important, spiritual and bright. Is this obsessive search for recognition also not the beginning of lust and false connection? It certainly is. Shouldn’t I honestly question everything I am and have been throughout my life?

I have been an egocentric. Always obsessed with me, me, me and me. My pleasure first and second and third. Watching porn videos and replacing this with watching entertaining and cultural videos on the internet doesn’t change the thing much because I end up drunk from the ego of asking for more and more pleasure, and if I’m just starting the day that way I spoil it. What I can do? I need to get out of this confinement. Pay attention to my sponsor who suggests one and a thousand ways: “Act. Stop thinking about you. Commit to a service, attend a daily meeting, etc.…”

A godson recently told me that because he has had to coordinate meetings, sometimes that has prevented a relapse. I identify with it. In my case I now provide a lot of service, but today I am grateful. In a way there is no worse jail than my own ego focused on my problems, real or imagined, without being able to get out of that confinement. They can take away your freedom, but even in jail you can experience the true connection with your Higher Power or God, and this is possible to the extent that I am in recovery. I need the real connection, the true love. It is the only thing that can fill me.

The false connection satisfies me for a moment and then I look for that same feeling of pleasure in something else, but in a more compulsive and out of control way. I need the true connection, remember that I am love. But a love that does not arise from self-deception, from selfish satisfaction, but from accepting my deepest but painful truth. And perhaps it is the service that has helped me. And it has freed me from this kind of invisible prison, where I had condemned myself. I was thinking recently, from my conversation with a godson: How much time would I not have spent in vain and fleeting lustful fantasies if I did not provide the service I give in the fellowship? God has given me this program. He has reached out to me through this fellowship, leading me first to be sober and recovering, and secondly to get out of myself, my ego, the prison of my mind, through service. So today I am grateful although occasionally I complain. Only in that way have I gradually recovered the keys to freedom, just for today. I ask my Higher Power to help me remember the enormous value of the service I provide for my recovery, and to share it with others who like me want to get out of this jail and are willing to know and experience a happy and joyful freedom.