It’s a struggle to not just use this time to masturbate. The rest of the family is asleep and there is no pressing thing to be done, and the internet is at my fingertips.

I try to remember that there is a sensation of release, a satisfaction, to the practice of writing, too. The blank page is a plinko board, and when your chip of a pen has plunked this way and that and has arrived at an unexpected finish, then you find yourself sighing, taking low slow breaths, your body and mind relaxed and refreshed.

I’m having a hard time with the activities that don’t move my plot forward. Social media and masturbation fall into the same bucket, like listening to the commercials in a podcast I could fast forward. (Is life too short to listen to the commercials or is life too short to click the button 3 times to fast forward a 45 seconds?) 

What do I get out of masturbation, then? I get the shot of endorphins, I get the momentary stress relief. And that’s something.

In the same way that I daily tell myself that I need to write more, since puberty I’ve been promising myself that I’ll stop masturbating. Now that I think of it, though, I haven’t told myself this for a time, maybe in years. I’ve told myself I should masturbate less, but I think I’ve made gains against the shame that was the motivation for thinking I should stop. I think shame, too, was the reason I never did stop–it was just such an easy thing to feel shame about. It’s a sustainable fuel.

But everything is everlasting kindling when you are a shame-person, I suppose. The time I peed 25 times during my date with the Kenyan nursing student, or when I farted in 7th grade English class–all my memories never aren’t available, like free porn, to get my shame-jollies off to. 

It wouldn’t be incorrect to say that I have been addicted to shame, that I once found comfort and identity in it, and let my desire to feel it destroy relationships and inhibit growth.

It is a daily, momentary struggle to fight the urge to slip in to the shame: it’s so unfair, of me, when my wife steps in to help with the kids, for me to feel like she is implying I’m not a good enough father. It’s so hard to pull away from the draw of that magnet.

 And yet, I tell her that I masturbate. So that’s some progress.

Plink. Plink.

Ahhhhhh.