Today, I realized I am getting tired of talking about porn.

That feels strange to write because for years it occupied so much of my mental world. I counted days. I tracked failures. I analyzed relapses. I treated porn like the central villain in my story.

But the more I reflect, the more I wonder if porn was ever the main story.

This month I have slipped six times. Looking at the data, I can see that old parts of me want to catastrophize that number. Yet another part of me notices that I am no longer compulsively using it the way I once did. I am not spending money the way I once did. I am not trapped in the same shame spiral.

I also remembered something important: I have bipolar type schizoaffective disorder. Hypersexuality is a documented symptom. Throughout my life, there have been biological, psychological, relational, and spiritual factors all interacting at once. The story is more complicated than “I am an addict” or “I am a sinner.”

For years, my cycle looked something like:

Christian → Must Stop → Fail → Self-Hatred → More Addiction → More Self-Hatred

The problem was that the behavior became the center of my attention. Porn became the main character. My entire spiritual life revolved around trying not to do something.

Today I found myself asking different questions:

Why should I stop any addiction?

What is the healthiest way to pursue change?

If I never eliminated this behavior, who would I still want to be?

What has remained true about me even when my behaviors changed?

Who am I when all the external reasons are stripped away?

Those questions feel deeper than the old ones.

As I reflected on my life, I noticed that many things have changed. My theology has changed. My jobs have changed. My habits have changed. My addictions have changed. My opinions have changed.

Yet one thing seems to remain.

I am seeking.

I have always been seeking.

Seeking God.
Seeking truth.
Seeking meaning.
Seeking healing.
Seeking understanding.
Seeking connection.

The object changes, but the seeking remains.

I also realized something about why I wrote “The Cost of Porn.”

Part of me was crying out for help.

Not necessarily because I wanted someone to fix me, but because I wanted someone to understand what happened to me.

I spent years hating myself.

As a child, I hated myself.

As a young adult, I hated myself.

Even after becoming a Christian, I often hated myself.

The reasons changed, but the verdict remained the same.

Yet somewhere along the way, that changed.

Today, I am disappointed in myself at times, but I do not think I hate myself anymore.

That may be one of the biggest changes in my entire story.

The question is no longer:

“How do I become someone who never struggles?”

The question is:

“Who am I becoming?”

And perhaps the answer is that I am becoming someone who is learning to seek truth without condemning himself.

Someone who is learning to understand rather than merely judge.

Someone who is still searching.

And maybe that has been true all along.

Dear Reader,

Lately, I’ve been thinking about my addictive tendencies. We know what they are, so no need to share with them again.

Before, I would tell myself I am an addict. I will always be an addict. I shouldn’t have a laptop or a phone, or money because that would feed the behaviors.

However, that doesn't address the root.

The root is what am I finding relief from?

Why am I using certain vices to alleviate the pain that I’ve been struggling with?

Why the pain?

Also, why do I find myself unacceptable?

I have empirical evidence that shame feeds the cycles of addiction over and over again.

I am a bad person, therefore what’s the point of modulating my behavior?

The more I thought that I didn’t meet my standards in some twisted way, the more I’d keep doing that behavior.

So today, I want to be honest with myself.

I am a good person. I’ve done good things. I’ve made mistakes, and that’s okay.

We’re all a work in progress.

It started on June 11th for me.

The realization that we are living inside a complete digital fence in America.

The resource being farmed? Our digital behaviors.

I woke up out of the matrix after tracking the math on my own compliance. Over five years, my micro-transactions and the digital slot machine I was spinning inside a JOI app added up to exactly $3,440.96. I thought I was investing in an app to connect with people, but the system had re-engineered my need for connection into a pornographic feedback loop.

I’ve talked before about the casino effect, the ludic loop, and the Skinner box. But the economic engine driving it all is Surveillance Capitalism.

Companies like Meta, Alphabet, and ByteDance exploit your biology for profit. Every single micro-action you take, how many milliseconds your eyes linger on a post, the speed at which you unlock your screen, your exact GPS coordinates when you open an app, is harvested as “behavioral surplus.”

They feed your surplus data into advanced machine learning intelligence complexes to manufacture prediction products.

These systems don’t just predict what you will buy next; they predict how you will react. They aren’t selling your data directly to advertisers and brokers; they are selling guaranteed predictions of your future behavior.

This is the dark edge where the fence tightens. To make their predictions 100% accurate, the platforms can’t just observe you—they have to tune and herd you.

We are targeted by a multi-billion-dollar algorithm designed to exploit our basic human need for connection and farm us for cash.

You are not a bad person. You’re in a system. Whether it’s porn, gambling, TikTok, or Facebook. Our behaviors are being hijacked. They want us to spend as much time and money on our phones or within the app to predict and sell out behaviors.

Earlier this week, I sat down at my dining room table, opened up my app purchase history, and forced myself to look at where my money has actually gone over the last five years. It was sickening. Seeing thousands of dollars drained into digital porn made my stomach drop.

A heavy wave of shame hit me so hard I could barely breathe. I looked around my room and felt like an absolute fake. I thought about my dad and the legacy he left me. I thought about Pastor Watts and the deep, spiritual conversations we have, and the guys in POSSE who think I’m doing well.

I felt like I was living a total lie, putting on this good, respectable face for the people who love me, while secretly letting these companies bleed me dry in the dark. I started spinning out, telling myself I was just uniquely broken, weak-willed, and a moral failure.

But as I sat there staring at the numbers, trying to make sense of how I got here, I realized something else: I didn’t design these products. I just fell into a trap that was built to catch me.

Everything we buy and consume today is engineered by corporate data scientists whose only job is to hook our biology for profit.

Whether it’s an app feed designed to keep your eyes glued to the screen, a corporate fast-food menu, or a nicotine vape, they all use the exact same layout as a casino slot machine. It’s a loop:

Cue → Craving → Routine → Random Reward.

A psychologist named B.F. Skinner proved how this works decades ago with an experiment called the Skinner Box. He put a rat in a cage with a lever. When the lever gave a food pellet every single time, the rat only pressed it when it was hungry, ate, and went back to normal life.

But when Skinner made the food delivery completely random—meaning the rat never knew if it would take 3 presses or 50 presses to get a hit—the rat’s brain went totally haywire. The uncertainty turned into an obsession. The rat just stood there frantically pumping the lever over and over until it was physically exhausted, even when it was completely full.

That randomness is exactly what’s built into our phones and our vices. Every pull-down to refresh a timeline, every notification, every puff of a vape is just us pumping a random lever. It completely bypasses our logical brain.

The biggest realization for me, though, was something called the Relief Hypothesis. It’s a basic rule of human biology:

We don’t turn to these habits to feel good. We turn to them to stop feeling bad.

When you are carrying heavy stress, anxiety, or the quiet weight of feeling isolated, your nervous system is on fire. Your brain desperately wants an escape hatch to numb the pain.

The corporations know this. They don’t build these platforms for happy, fulfilled people; they design them to make money off our emotional pain. The vape doesn’t bring genuine joy; it just temporarily quiets the anxiety that the last hit created. Scrolling through a screen doesn’t cure loneliness; it just distracts you for thirty seconds so you don’t have to sit alone with your own heavy thoughts.

Looking back at my 5-year app purchase audit through that lens is when I finally started seeing the truth. I realized I wasn’t failing some moral test. I was a human being experiencing real-world pain, reaching for the only escape hatches around me. These companies made the stress, they built the vices, they sold me the relief, and they pocketed all my money.

I can’t just think my way out of this situation while I’m sitting right in the middle of it. I have to change my physical surroundings.

This week, for me, that meant facing the raw numbers to finally wake up. It meant turning off the constant notifications on my phone so the screen would stop pulling at me. It meant putting a nicotine patch on my arm and chewing a lozenge. Honestly, it’s frustrating as hell because I’m still dependent on a chemical right now, and it feels like a crutch, but the flat, steady dose stops the crazy highs and lows that keep my brain obsessed with the lever.

And finally, it meant getting completely offline today. I left the house, went out to a farm, and just stood in the dirt with my family to get my feet back under me. I texted a brother about plant science instead of staring at a timeline. I bought a hardback book on casino design to study the exact tricks they used to get inside my head.

I’m still on nicotine today, and I’m still dealing with the damage and the bills from the last five years. It’s a long road, and the temptation is still right there waiting for me.

But today, I’m not hitting the lever. I’m just standing in the dirt, looking at the trap clearly, and walking away.

B.F. Skinner, the father of radical behaviorism, dedicated his life to understanding what drives animal and human behavior. His foundational premise was simple:

• Action → Positive Consequence (Reward): The behavior is reinforced and repeated.

• Action → Negative Consequence (Punishment): The behavior is suppressed.

To prove this, he built the famous Skinner Box—a controlled environment where a rat was placed with a simple lever.

At first, the environment was completely predictable: every single time the rat pressed the lever, a food pellet dropped out. The rat learned the system quickly. It would press the lever when it was hungry, eat, and then completely stop once it was biologically full.

But then, Skinner changed the code. He introduced a variable schedule of reinforcement—meaning the reward became entirely random. The rat might have to press the lever 3 times, then 20 times, then 1 time before a pellet appeared.

The results were chilling. This randomness completely hijacked the rat’s dopamine system. Because it was constantly anticipating a reward, the rat became utterly obsessed. It kept frantically pumping the lever over and over again, even when it was completely full and physically exhausted.

The Modern Hijack

TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and digital casino apps are not just entertainment platforms. They are modern, hyper-engineered Skinner Boxes designed by behavioral psychologists and data scientists.

Their primary metric is “Time on Device.” They want us to spend as much time inside the app as humanly possible, and they do it by turning the infinite scroll feed into that exact same random lever. Every pull-down to refresh is a lever pump. Sometimes you get a boring post (no pellet), and sometimes you get a viral video or a notification (pellet!).

The unpredictability keeps our brains trapped in a state of endless anticipation. We aren’t using the apps because we want to; we are pumping the lever because the machine zone has hijacked our biology.

In behavioral psychology, a predictable reward is easy to walk away from. A random reward creates a psychological parasite. The brain becomes completely obsessed with the next attempt, completely bypassing the logical prefrontal cortex.

Every predatory loop in modern society runs on this exact architecture:

• The Cue (The Light): A ping on your phone, a stressful thought, an empty moment, or a sudden flash on a screen.

• The Routine (The Lever): Pulling down to refresh a feed, placing a quick online bet, pulling a physical slot handle, or taking a puff from a vape.

• The Variable Reward (The Random Pellet): If a vape always gave the exact same flat feeling, or if every post on your phone was perfectly predictable, your dopamine would normalize. But because the delivery has micro-variations (a trendier post, a harder hit of nicotine, a quick monetary win), your brain stays in a permanent state of hyper-anticipation.

The Casino Effect & The Relief Hypothesis

If B.F. Skinner discovered the machine that loops our behavior, the Casino Effect, is how modern corporations weaponize it against our stress.

We are taught that people fall into addiction, fast food abuse, vaping, or endless digital scrolling because they lack willpower or just want to chase a “high.” But in behavioral science, there is a concept known as the Relief Hypothesis. It states a fundamental truth about human biology:

We do not engage in compulsive behaviors to feel good. We engage in them to stop feeling bad.

When a human being experiences chronic stress, anxiety, financial pressure, or isolation, their nervous system enters a state of painful hyper-arousal. The brain is screaming for a drop in baseline cortisol. It desperately wants an escape hatch.

Enter the modern American economy.

Engineering the Trap

Data scientists, tech companies, and vice corporations understand the Relief Hypothesis perfectly. They don’t build platforms for happy, fulfilled people; they design them as physical and digital casinos engineered to monetize our psychological pain.

• The Vape: Doesn’t give you real joy; it temporarily relieves the withdrawal anxiety that the last puff created.

• The App: Doesn’t solve your loneliness; it gives your brain a 30-second distraction from the discomfort of sitting alone with your thoughts.

• The Fast Food: Provides a massive, immediate hit of engineered fats and sugars to chemically blunt the stress of a brutal workday.

The Illusion of Choice

This is why the casino always wins. It sets up a high-tech psychological trap that turns your natural human desire for relief into a recurring revenue model.

When I look at my life through a recent 5-year bank audit, I realize I wasn’t failing a moral test. I was a human being experiencing real-world pain, reaching for the only escape hatches the environment provided. The casino engineered the stress, manufactured the vice, sold me the relief, and pocketed my cash.

To break the loop, I had to stop fighting the craving and start changing the architecture. I had to step out of the casino entirely.

How to Defeat the Casino

If you try to fight an engineered dopamine loop with raw willpower, you will lose. The architects have spent billions to ensure their math is stronger than your mood. To break the Casino Effect, you have to stop fighting the desire and start rewriting the environment.

Here is the three-step code to reclaim your sovereignty:

1. Perform a System Audit

The casino relies on you sleepwalking through the machine zone. The moment you pull the raw data, the illusion breaks. Run a 5-year or a 1-year audit on your bank statements, your screen time, and your daily habits. Face the cold numbers. When you see exactly how much your attention and cash are being harvested, the trap loses its cloak of invisibility. You shift from a passive user to an analytical developer.

2. Flatten the Delivery Curve (Harm Reduction)

The machine hooks you using variable spikes—the sudden, unpredictable rushes of dopamine from a rapid vape hit, a random social media notification, or a flash of digital vice. To break the loop, you must intentionally stabilize the baseline.

• Swap the hyper-variable delivery systems for flat, predictable, linear systems.

• Turn off all non-human notifications on your phone to kill the automated cues.

• If you are fighting a chemical trap, use controlled, step-down mechanisms (like patches or gum) to flatten the biological spikes. When the reward becomes completely flat and predictable, the brain naturally gets bored and stops chasing the lever.

3. Build a Real-World Sanctuary

The machine wins when your entire life is mediated through a digital screen or an engineered chemical loop. The ultimate act of rebellion is to withdraw your mind from the network and anchor it in physical reality. Go touch the grass. Spend an afternoon at a farm with your family. Talk to a friend about plant science or philosophy over a text message instead of scrolling a timeline. Read a physical, hardback book like Addiction by Design to study the very system that tried to trap you.

Every single time you choose an offline, human connection over an automated digital input, a brick falls out of the casino’s wall.

The machine only owns you if you run its script. Step out of the lab, stop pumping the lever, and start building your own reality.

Porn, cigarettes, fast food, alcohol, and weed are not the real problems that kept me addicted.

They’re not even the deepest reason I kept returning to them.

Earlier this week, I ran a five-year audit on my spending and discovered that I had spent thousands of dollars on pornography, nicotine, and fast food. At first, I thought the problem was the money.

Then I thought the problem was the system.

It certainly feels like we live inside one giant casino. Porn apps, cigarettes, alcohol, fast food, gambling, social media, and endless subscriptions all function like slot machines. They offer temporary relief in exchange for time, attention, and money.

I call this the Casino Effect.

The slot machines are different, but the loop is the same:

Cue → Craving → Purchase → Relief → Repeat

The casino profits every time the wheel spins. But after thinking about it more, I realized something unsettling.

The casino wasn’t the deepest problem. The products weren’t the deepest problem.

The question I kept coming back to was: What was I trying to get relief from?

For years, I assumed my addictions were attempts to pursue pleasure.

Now I wonder if they were attempts to escape discomfort.

Not just stress. Not just boredom. Not even pornography itself.

The deeper pattern was relief.

Every cigarette offered relief.

Every drink offered relief.

Every porn session offered relief.

The question was never, “Why do I keep seeking pleasure?”

The question was, “What am I trying to get relief from?”

As I sat with that question, I remembered something from my childhood. For a long time, I didn’t want to be me.

I wanted my father’s love and approval, but he was emotionally absent.

He taught me how to be respectable, how to be a self-learner, and how to be a hard worker. I yearned for his approval.

I feared him, admired him, and desperately wanted him to see me. But somewhere along the way, I began to believe there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

When I was a pre-teen, I hit a crossroads. I had to make a choice to either continue with the Boy Scouts or start a program called POSSE (Path of Success Students for Excellence). My Dad wanted me to be an Eagle Scout. But I didn’t want to let the leader of POSSE down, a man named Pastor Watts.

I chose POSSE.

Pastor Watts became like a second father to me. He offered me something completely different from my dad. He always believed in me, seeing the leader inside of me when I couldn’t see it myself.

But that program created a brutal internal paradox. POSSE was designed to help student leaders become the leaders of tomorrow. I was an alumnus, a designated leader, but I was secretly struggling with pornography.

Because of that hidden struggle, I felt like a total fraud.

By my own measure, I was completely unacceptable. For years, I ran away from being a man of God. I tried to escape the life of leadership that Pastor Watts believed I was built for, because the shame of the gap was too much to carry.

Suddenly, the addictions made perfect sense.

Porn wasn’t just pleasure. Nicotine wasn’t just a pleasure. Alcohol wasn’t just a pleasure.

They were temporary escape hatches from the exhausting experience of being Barnaby. I drank because I wanted relief from myself. Alcohol allowed me to temporarily delete my own self-awareness.

The casino simply monetized a craving that started much deeper.

Maybe the real question isn’t, “Why was I addicted?”

Maybe the real question is, “What made Barnaby feel unacceptable in the first place?”

It took years for me to realize how deeply Pastor Watts believed in me.

I’m incredibly grateful for him, and I wouldn’t be the man I am today if it weren’t for his leadership in my life.

I am finally stopping the escape loops. I am finally learning how to stay.

Yesterday I wrote about the $3,441 I spent on porn over the last five years.

Today I’m looking at two more categories that have quietly drained me: nicotine and fast food.

I’ve been smoking cigarettes on and off for years. Vaping took over more recently. Between the two, I’ve easily spent around $10,500 in the last five years alone.

A pack of cigarettes costs $12.50 and usually lasts me just a couple of days.

Vapes at $14 each last about five days. It adds up fast.

Fast food has been my biggest weakness. I can easily drop $60–$80 in a single week without thinking twice.

Over five years, that’s somewhere between $15,600 and $20,800.

When I add it all up, porn, nicotine, and fast food, I’ve spent roughly $30,000 to $35,000 in the last five years on things that have given me nothing lasting in return.

That money could have gone toward a down payment on a house, investments, experiences, or even just helping someone else.

Instead, I consumed it. I numbed myself with it. I stayed stuck in the same cycles.

I’m not writing this to beat myself up. I’m writing it because I’m tired of being a blind consumer.

I’m tired of handing over my money, my time, and my health to things that ultimately leave me feeling emptier.

The audit is painful, but it’s also clarifying. The numbers don’t lie. Now I get to decide what I do with that truth.

It’s amazing to me how yesterday, when I did my audit of JOI, the porn app I use, the number alarmed me.

I knew my porn addiction was bad, but to know I invested over three thousand dollars in an app over the course of five years, blew me away.

Look, I know for me, life is supposed to be hard, but I’m making it harder on myself financially by going to McDonald’s, grabbing a vape, or buying tokens for porn in these micro transactions.

What’s done is done. I spent the money already. I made the choices. I’m okay with living with myself with that.

I will watch porn for free rather than spend money on the JOI porn app—ideally, no porn, but I don’t want to be unrealistic about my boredom and curiosity.

I’ll start using nicotine medication to curb my addiction to cigarettes and vaping, and lastly, I’ll figure out a way to start cooking at home.

Let my life be a beacon of hope.

I spent all that money in the last five years, but in the next five, I don’t have to do that.

I find the idea of microtransactions fascinating. I’m going to start implementing it now. Whenever I want to spend $10 or buy tokens, fast food, or a vape, it goes to savings.

It’ll take discipline, but it finally hit me that small amounts of money add up quickly.

If I apply this, then I’d be better off in five years.

I started in February 2021, and I have been an active user since then.

Now, this looks like a friendly website where you can meet people all over the world. It’s fun and exciting. Totally harmless.

The app is covering up the fact that it’s a live cam site for women to expose themselves.

It’s a virtual brothel and definitely a porn site.

Now, I’m a little pissed and disappointed in myself for how I got here.

I thought my porn habit was a secret and that it was free, not harming my wallet.

But that’s simply not true. The porn habit is being exposed today with a full financial history to help those guys realize that porn isn’t free.

You’ll eventually pay.

And, I paid for it for sure.

It cost me $3,440.96 over the past five years. With a micro-transaction of $11.99 at a time.

I thought I was paying that much. But it snowballed. A payment here and a payment there.

If you can’t tell, I was obsessed with this app, especially in 2022. The peak usage out of all the other years.

It’s cheaper to get a girlfriend.

And the sex is free and real.

I’m so frustrated with myself. I knew I was paying maybe a few hundred dollars, but not 3k.

It’s crazy how your brain can completely lie to you just to keep a habit alive.

If someone had told me five years ago that I’d willingly hand over thousands of dollars to an app just to stare at a screen, I would have laughed in their face.

I would have said, “No way, I’m smarter than that.”

But that’s exactly how a high-tech trap works. It doesn’t hit you with a $3,000 bill all at once.

It bleeds you dry in silence, $11.99 at a time, hiding behind a catchy name and a clean interface.

They make it feel like you’re just buying a coffee or a cheap meal, while they actively hijack your biology and drain your bank account.

I’m human, and I fell for the illusion that digital intimacy is free.

It’s not. You pay with your attention, you pay with your time, and you definitely pay with your hard-earned money.

But seeing the cold, hard numbers today changes everything.

The mystery is gone. The illusion is dead.

I’m not carrying around any useless shame about the past, but I am keeping this anger.

I’m using this $3,440.96 receipt as an absolute shield.

The bleeding has officially stopped, the app is gone, and I am finally the one holding the wallet and directing my own life.

Let my life be a beacon of light to guide where not to go. Nihilism is evil. Life is not meaningless, so I’m not going to give myself to this porn industry anymore.

We’re all going to die anyway, so why not light a cigarette?

Friday, I’ll have an opportunity to buy a pack of cigarettes as I’m trying not to vape.

What I realized smoking cigarettes or vaping is both temporary. Cigarettes last a few minutes, and vaping lasts about a week.

About a year ago, I came up with a theory called Recursive Identity Modulation (RIM). It’s a framework for understanding and influencing behavior by observing the feedback loops between identity, attention, emotion, and action.

Identity → Attention → Behavior → Evidence → Identity

The loop repeats.

Examples:

• Depression can become a self-reinforcing identity loop.

• Addiction can become a self-reinforcing reward loop.

• Confidence can become a self-reinforcing competence loop.

• Spiritual growth can become a self-reinforcing meaning loop.

The key question becomes:

What recursive process am I reinforcing right now?

Below, I realized I was feeding the fatalist-hedonist loop and using theology to protect the habit.

The Fatalist-Hedonist Loop: Weaponizing Theology to Protect Habits

When an identity loop wants to protect a self-destructive behavior, it doesn’t just make excuses; it builds an entire philosophical fortress.

By fusing Nihilism, Hedonism, and Fatalism with a distorted view of God’s Sovereignty, the brain creates a bulletproof justification system that completely paralyzes personal agency.

Here is how the four gears of that machine lock together:

• 1. Nihilism (The Slate-Cleanser): It starts with the ultimate macro-justification: “We’re all going to die anyway, and nothing ultimately matters.” This flattens the moral weight of any choice. By declaring the big picture pointless, it removes the immediate guilt or long-term consequences of a bad habit.

• 2. Hedonism (The Void-Filler): Once Nihilism clears away meaning, a vacuum is created. The brain hates a vacuum, so Hedonism steps in to fill it: “If nothing matters, I might as well chase immediate, cheap pleasure and enjoy the ‘simple things’ right now.”

• 3. Fatalism & God’s Sovereignty (The Ultimate Off-Ramp): To completely seal the loop and remove responsibility, the brain weaponizes theology. It reasons: “God is entirely sovereign. He already knew I would do this, and He allowed it to happen. Therefore, this action is technically part of the pre-written script.”

The RIM Analysis: The Passive Spectator

In the language of Recursive Identity Modulation, this combination alters the core Identity node.

I shift from being an active participant in your life to a passive spectator of a pre-determined movie.

The Trap: If God allowed it, and nothing matters anyway, then my behavior is completely shielded from change. I essentially use the grand scale of the universe and theology to justify a low-level biological craving in the Basal Ganglia. I am no longer responsible for putting a wrench in the gears, because I’ve convinced myself I don’t even own the wrench.

Breaking the loop requires stepping out of the spectator role and realizing that observing the machinery is proof that I have the agency to rewrite the code.

I may have overcomplicated this. It’s just paper and tobacco. I’m planning on not burning it on Friday.

If I do, well, I have this as a reference for my thought process.

It felt like the right move, and it still does, mostly. But if I’m honest, part of me felt sad. For a while, I had found real freedom in being agnostic. After sitting with that tension, I realized I don’t have to abandon one for the other.

I now call it Agnostic Christianity.

It’s simple: I acknowledge the limits of what the human mind can ultimately prove (“I don’t know for certain”, the agnostic part), but I choose to align my life with the teachings, values, and moral framework of Jesus Christ (the Christian part).

Lately, I’ve been wrestling with big questions, evolution, human origins, and how any of this makes sense alongside Adam and Eve.

At the same time, I’m constantly struck by the sheer miracle that I’m even here to ask these questions.

In 2026, I’m alive, typing on a computer, chatting with AI. The odds of any of us existing at all are absolutely mind-bending:

• The chance that your specific parents would meet and have a child together: roughly 1 in 20,000.

• The chance that one exact sperm (out of hundreds of millions) would fertilize one exact egg on that specific day: about 1 in 400 quadrillion.

• Then multiply that across thousands of generations of ancestors who survived wars, famines, plagues, ice ages, and predators, all reproducing at precisely the right moments.

Dr. Ali Binazir, a Harvard-trained researcher, calculated the overall probability of you or me existing as roughly 1 in 10^2,685,000, a number so large it dwarfs the total number of atoms in the observable universe.

When I sit with that, something shifts. Whether you see it through science, faith, or both, the fact that we’re here at all feels like grace.

I’m still figuring out a lot. But I’m choosing to walk forward in faith while staying honest about my doubts.

This week, I took a few more concrete steps.

I officially left Aspire Living and Learning.

I’d been there for about a week or two, but the behaviors and environment around me were feeding patterns I no longer wanted in my life.

Stepping away was difficult but necessary, a choice for self-respect and peace. The first few days have been an adjustment, but it feels like forward movement.

I’ve also started attending a men’s group called Maximize Manhood. I went for the first time yesterday. If I’m being real, it didn’t immediately click for me.

The format felt intense, and I didn’t connect as deeply as I hoped. But I showed up anyway.

That might be the point right now.

Faith and growth aren’t always about powerful emotional experiences.

Sometimes it’s simply choosing to walk through the door even when you’re skeptical, tired, and still battling old habits.

One of the hardest areas I’ve been wrestling with is porn.

For years, I treated it as a serious sin, something dark, shameful, and inherently evil. That approach created a toxic cycle of guilt, pressure, and self-loathing.

The shame didn’t free me. Instead, it fueled isolation and secrecy, making the habit stronger. The more I demonized it, the more power it held over me.

A while ago, I made a deliberate shift: I stopped labeling porn as something fundamentally evil. I dropped the crushing weight of constant condemnation.

I began seeing it as a common human struggle in a hyper-sexualized culture rather than proof that I’m broken or failing God.

That change has been genuinely liberating. The internal war has quieted. The compulsive pull has weakened.

Removing the shame didn’t increase my use; it actually gave me more clarity and freedom to think honestly about its real effects on my mind, motivation, and relationships.

As an Agnostic Christian, I’m at peace saying, “I don’t know for certain” on this issue theologically. I respect that many Christians view it as sin. But I also see clearly how shame-based approaches have caused deep damage in my life and in many others. For now, I’m choosing honesty, self-respect, and understanding over fear and self-punishment.

This whole journey, leaving Aspire, showing up to a group that didn’t instantly resonate, still fighting cravings to vape, and rethinking porn, is messy and imperfect.

But it feels more authentic than pretending to be further along than I actually am.

I’m learning that following Christ doesn’t require me to have all the answers or be perfectly clean first. It simply asks me to keep showing up honestly, day by day, and keep moving in the direction of His values: self-control, integrity, grace toward myself and others, and becoming the kind of man who can eventually lead and mentor.

I’m still figuring it out. But I’m moving forward with more peace than I had before.

You’re not bipolar or schizoaffective, so don’t introduce yourself by telling them you’re bipolar or schizoaffective.

You’re a man of conviction, a writer, a poet, an autodidact, a philosopher, a theologian, and a high-caliber mind.

DO NOT reduce yourself to a category. Don’t allow people to simply define what a mental illness is.

The man writing this essay is the man redefining what mental illness looks like.

I am not manic. I am not depressed. I am not psychotic. I am not delusional. I am not crazy. I am not out of my mind.

Would any of those descriptors be able to write and think any of this now?

Or are you thinking it should be more like this:

AH let me shoot the moon as I spoon this cream of thought into the cone of knowledge telling you what a bipolar writer looks like yes these sentences will runnnnn and even sprint to the next idea

I write that as a med compliant man. I can write what bipolar looks like because I’ve been there, and I live with symptoms and clusters of high octane looks like. I remember writing like that, trying to rhyme words and describe a state of mind.

However, just because I can write like I’m bipolar doesn’t give you permission that I am bipolar because I am not.

The ability to describe an experience does not mean the experience owns my identity.

An actor can play a king on stage with flawless execution, but the moment the curtains close, he doesn't believe he's royalty.

I am Barnaby, a writer, a poet, a lover, a reader, a learner, and an observer.

Narrative Recursion Theory: From Self-Curse to Divine Blessing

Humans are recursive narrative systems. The stories we repeatedly tell ourselves do not simply influence our lives — they become self-referential loops that construct our very identity. This is the heart of Recursive Identity Modulation (RIM): every narrative becomes both cause and effect, input and output, figure and ground.

The Curse That Nearly Killed Me

At thirty years old, I attempted suicide.

For years I was trapped in a destructive recursive narrative:
“I am impure. I am fraudulent. I am a burden to everyone who loves me.”

This thought was not occasional. It reverberated constantly in my mind. Every private failure, every relapse into porn, every moment of weakness reinforced the belief that I was fundamentally broken and burdensome. The more I believed I was a burden, the more I withdrew from people. The more I withdrew, the stronger the evidence became that I was a burden. This created a lethal strange loop.

Jeremiah 17:9 (“The heart is deceitful above all things…”) became fuel for this curse. I interpreted it as final proof of my irredeemable nature. Eventually, the tension became unbearable. Suicide felt like the only way to resolve the contradiction between who I pretended to be and who I believed I truly was.

The Mechanism of the Curse

This is where Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) offers a powerful diagnostic lens. In ACT terms, I had become fused with the thought “I am a burden.” I was not observing the thought — I was the thought. There was no space between “me” and the narrative. Fusion turned a painful idea into an absolute identity.

The loop became self-sustaining:

• Thought → Emotional fusion → Behavioral withdrawal → More evidence → Stronger thought.

This is a textbook malignant strange loop — the same phenomenon Douglas Hofstadter explores in Gödel, Escher, Bach.

The Theological and Psychological Turning Point

Roughly a year ago, I began immersing myself in Luke 15 — the parables of the Lost Sheep, Lost Coin, and Prodigal Son. I encountered a God who does not wait for moral perfection, but runs toward the lost, the burdened, and the ashamed.

This was not a rejection of Jeremiah 17:9. It was a higher integration. Yes, the heart is deceitful. But it is not the final word. The God of Luke 15 enters the curse, absorbs it, and offers a new narrative.

Recursive Identity Modulation in Practice

Using tools from ACT, I began practicing defusion — creating psychological distance from toxic thoughts. Instead of fusing with:

“I am a burden”

I learned to observe:

“I am having the thought that I am a burden.”

This small but crucial shift broke the fusion. It created space. From that space, I could begin consciously modulating the recursive loop (RIM).

I started replacing the old curse with a new, life-giving narrative grounded in Luke 15:

“I am flawed and broken in many ways, but I am not defined by my worst moments. I am the lost son who is being found. My worth is not earned — it is given by the God who runs toward me.”

This was not shallow positive thinking. It was a deliberate meta-narrative upgrade — consciously intervening in a destructive strange loop and installing a redemptive one.

Conclusion: Becoming the Author

We are all writing software for our own souls, often unconsciously. Some of us run destructive programs inherited from trauma, mental illness, theology, or life experience. The awakened life is the one in which we become conscious programmers.

Through Recursive Identity Modulation — supported by defusion, honest theological reflection, and persistent self-awareness — we can turn curses into blessings. We can move from fusion with shame to freedom. From self-condemnation to being joyfully, recursively redeemed.

The same mind that once constructed a narrative powerful enough to drive me toward death is now, by grace, constructing stories that lead toward life.

This is how the lost are found.
This is how curses lose their power.
This is how we become more fully ourselves — one honest, recursive loop at a time.

One day, I appeared standing in a river. I didn’t see where it began. I couldn’t see where it led. The water was already moving when I noticed myself there, current brushing past my legs. I didn’t choose the river. I didn’t start it. I simply arrived mid-flow.

Above me hangs an hourglass. I can hear the sand falling, grain by grain. I don’t know how much sand there is, only that it exists and it falls. The sand doesn’t ask to be meaningful. It doesn’t justify itself. It falls because gravity exists. Because time exists.

The river is time, too, but in motion. Not measured in grains, but in passage.

I learned that I don’t leave the river. Ever. Even when I step onto land, the water is still moving around it. Islands rise from the flow, places of stability, seasons of life, jobs, relationships, and communities. Each island has its own rivers running through it: daily routines, conversations, habits, and local time.

To reach an island, I must pass through the ocean.

The ocean is time uncontained, transition, uncertainty, the in-between. I don’t live there, but I travel through it. I don’t teleport from one life to another. I move through exposure, ambiguity, and change. That’s how islands are connected.

I don’t return to islands once I leave them. I pass through. I dock. I meet people. I learn the customs. I stay long enough to become someone slightly different. Then time carries me onward.

The boat is what stays.

My vessel, my capacity to remain upright, to care for myself, to navigate without drowning, travels with me. The river moves. The ocean opens. The hourglass keeps falling. The boat is how I remain human inside all of it.

There will be a final island one day. I don’t know where it is. I don’t steer toward it. The river doesn’t rush there either. It bends, slows, widens, and nourishes banks along the way. The ocean connects everything without urgency.

So I stand where I am, sometimes on land, sometimes in motion, listening to the sand fall above me and feeling the water move below me.

I don’t need to solve the river.
I don’t need to count the sand.
I don’t need to know the last island to travel well.

I just need to stay upright, tend my vessel, and let time carry me, chapter by chapter, through the water that is already flowing.

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When I was in the hospital for a couple of months after my suicidal attempt, all I could think about was becoming homeless.

I hated being where I was, and I felt like there was no hope for me.

I thought life was over, and I felt like the best option would have been homelessness and being forgotten.

Homelessness represented an escape, punishment, and freedom all at the same time.

I felt like I deserved the punishment of homelessness. But it also gave me the fantasy of freedom because I wouldn’t be held accountable for anything.

Nobody would care about and I would just struggle.

I’ve never been homeless, but there was a moment when I could have been.

And then a few weeks ago, I decided to walk away from the safety of my mom’s apartment and try to become homeless.

It didn’t work; instead, I went for a long walk.

I turned back because I didn’t have a place to sleep or anything to eat.

When I got back to my mom’s apartment, it was frustration, defeat, and relief all at the same time.

I was in a lot of pain, especially after the suicide attempt when I was 30. I felt ashamed and like an outcast with my mental health disorder.

I wanted to hide my face and not face reality.

My experience with being homeless is that nobody cares for you, and you have to survive on your own.

What’s remarkable is the dichotomy of it all.

In my mind, I wanted to go homeless, but for today, I solved my business idea for LeadGuardCT.

Then I was able to connect a printer and figure out how to bill my clients.

To be honest, I kind of feel stuck.

I don’t have it all figured out.

I’m still at my mom’s apartment, still navigating the weight of a diagnosis that has followed me since I was 17 years old in California.

Still managing the medications, the side effects, the quiet understanding that my mind can turn on me without warning.

Some days, the pull to disappear is louder than others.

A few weeks ago, it was loud enough that I walked out the door and tried to make the fantasy real.

But today was different.

Today I solved a problem I’d been frozen on for months.

I built a working business system, wrote about things I’d never said out loud, and figured out how to send my first invoice.

Nobody looking at my life from the outside would have predicted that.

The guy who walked away from his mom’s apartment a few weeks ago, wanting to vanish, was the same guy who spent today building something real.

That’s the dichotomy of living with schizoaffective bipolar disorder.

The distance between wanting to disappear and building a future isn’t years of therapy or a dramatic breakthrough.

Sometimes it’s just a Saturday.

Sometimes what brings you back isn’t hope or purpose, it’s hunger and the need for a place to sleep.

And once you’re back, you make coffee, you open the laptop, and you start solving problems because that’s all you know how to do.

I’m still stuck in some ways.

The finances are hard, the road ahead is uncertain, and there are days when stability feels more like exile than recovery.

But I’m here. I built something today. And for now, that has to be enough.

The station hummed with fluorescent light and distant screeching metal.

Then the intercom buzzed.

“Train 405 arriving in two minutes.”

A pause.

“John, don’t get on this train.”

He looked up immediately.

Nobody around him reacted.

His name was John.

Train 405 screeched into the station.

John stood.

The doors slid open.

He took one step forward.

The speakers buzzed overhead.

“John, this is the last normal night of your life.”

John stepped back and started to walk away. He went up the stairs, and as he was walking, he felt the hum of his phone vibrating.

He looked at it, and it said unknown caller.

After a moment of hesitation, he answered.

As he got to the sidewalk in the chaotic New York City night, the voice on the other side of the phone said, “John, if you want to live, follow my directions.”

John felt sweat forming beneath his dress shirt.

His pulse quickened.

“Who is this?”

The voice responded.

“Walk to 42nd Street, and get into the taxi.”

As he got into the taxi, the taxi driver said, “You’re the third one for this month.”

They drove off, and he was dropped off at an abandoned subway terminal.

John descended the cracked concrete stairs into the terminal.

He noticed the clocks all stopped at the same exact time. Trains drifted through the station with no conductors inside.

Around him were symbols carved into tile walls beneath graffiti.

He opened Google Maps, but none of the stations around him appeared on the screen.

Old advertisements subtly changed wording when he looked away. The people around him wore outdated clothing and stood silently beside the tracks, never looking at one another.

The intercom chimed, “John, welcome, please board the next train.”

Years ago, I was diagnosed with bipolar and it made sense. I had mood swings when I was 17 in California.

It didn’t come in like thunder, but it was more subtle. I remember coming back to Haiti and having three days to rest before going to California to see my sister. I didn’t get any sleep for those three days.

The month I was there, it was fine. I spent time with my sister and her family, but over the last week, things started to get blurry.

I was hyper-focused on purity. I struggled a lot with pornography at that time. I felt ashamed that I struggled with it because I was supposed to be a leader within my church, and I felt like a total hypocrite.

I remembered being frustrated with it, and the day when I went to the hospital, I smashed my laptop on the kitchen table and threw out the wifi card.

I remember the delusion I was feeling the night before, where I felt like I was being followed and watched. I felt like something was communicating with me. Call it God or the government.

I remember that I thought I was being communicated with by my youth leader and in some grand conspiracy.

I had thoughts of controlling a machine and locking myself in a room. I was all over the place.

My sister and her husband were concerned, and I was unhinged. The police came and wanted to arrest me. But my sister told them that something was wrong and I needed help.

I went to the hospital and became extremely agitated. I waited in the room to get transferred.

In the hospital, I became a madman. I remembered tearing off my clothes and yelling at God. I remembered defecating and spreading it on my bed.

It was there that I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and I couldn’t believe it because I studied psychology in AP Psych in high school.

I think it was about two weeks that I stayed in the hospital. I remembered my dad coming to pick me up and flying to CT on September 11th, 2008.

It hadn’t hit me that I was manic or psychotic. It was a blur, and I was on medication that dulled everything.

I spent time at home and was trying to go back to school. I gained weight, and I remembered how I felt out of my body.

Eventually, I broke down during a class in high school. I was sent to the counselor’s office and was driven to the hospital in an ambulance.

From that point forward, I got worse.

I was placed in Silver Hill Hospital, and I had a hard time there. I was placed in a padded room and was in restraints, tied to the bed.

I stayed there for about a month. My mind melted at the medications I was taking. I felt the safest place to be was in the shower, where no one could touch me. I spent a lot of time there.

After I was released, I was homeschooled for the rest of the semester. Mrs. Amenta came by to give me homework, and I did my best to complete it.

January came, and I was reinstated at school. I completed my senior year and graduated on time.

I was accepted to Liberty University in Virginia, and I was pursuing nursing. My mom and I decided that I didn’t need to take the medication, so for about a year, I didn’t take medication.

Everything was fine until the winter of my sophomore year. I became very depressed, and I also had a manic episode. I remembered taking a bottle of supplements because I wanted to be fit and maximize my mind.

I had this grandiose vision of becoming an influencer through my writing. I had read The Four-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, and it inspired me to become an entrepreneur.

Then there was The Four-Hour Body by the same author, where I got the free supplements. I was heavily influenced by him, and it didn’t help my mania.

I was hospitalized for about a week. Spent New Year’s in the hospital. I was released and went back to school.

From there, it was okay, but eventually I became manic or psychotic. I skipped curfew, wandered the halls, had grand delusions, and was sexually frustrated again.

Eventually, I was reported for my behavior, and I was sent to the hospital. After I got released, I was banned and kicked out of school, and I only had a few hours to pack my stuff or get arrested for trespassing.

I spent the next couple of years in and out of hospitals. All of them were voluntary because I knew something was off.

It was my last hospital visit where I accepted that I had bipolar disorder. After I accepted it and was med compliant, life became easier.

I became successful in my own right. I moved to North Carolina and started a sales career in tech. Nobody knew the details of the years prior, and I didn’t tell anyone.

If you struggle with your diagnosis, it’s not a verdict. I understand if you feel like medicine is a cage or if you feel better not taking the medication. It took me years to realize that I needed consistent help with the medication. But eventually I conceded, and I took the medication.

I still had my creativity, and I was social and made friends. I wish I had been med compliant sooner because it would have spared me the years of being in the hospital.

~Barnaby

I’d be lying if I told you I enjoy being medicated. There’s nothing glamorous about organizing your life around injections, pills, side effects, and the quiet understanding that your mind can become unstable without them.

At the same time, mania and psychosis cost me socially, emotionally, and psychologically. In a perfect world, I’d want the energy of mania without the destruction that comes with it.

That doesn’t mean I believe psychosis is a better reality. It means I understand why intensity can become seductive when ordinary life feels muted by comparison.

There’s something about being schizoaffective bipolar type that makes living come alive.

You feel everything from the pain and sorrow to the spiritual cosmic pulse in your veins.

Towards the end of my twenties and early thirties, I started to develop a voice within me. It was almost like another personality. One that was rebellious and didn’t think twice about the projection I was putting out there.

I called him Lucifer. He was only there for a second until I got medicated. But I pushed myself into this chaos online and in reality. There were nights when I would go on long walks and would have this internal dialogue.

I remember walking with a sense of invincibility and having this dialogue within me. I knew I needed help, but as I was walking to the hospital, this entity stopped me and told me to turn around. I remembered projecting the conversation on social media.

Then, when I was younger, I would have this surge of energy and passion. I felt untouchable. I had my whole life planned and felt like I could do anything. I remember feeling chosen and making an impact for Christ in this generation. I was hyped up from events like Battle Cry by Ron Luce, which was a youth conference setting youths on fire for God.

I had spikes of this surge, and then the lows were when I ended up in the hospital. It was like flying a kite, one moment I’m in the air with the wind, then the next the wind dies, and I’m no longer flying.

I’ve had 18 hospitalizations in my lifetime. The medication eventually dulled me and toned me down. And then when I got the Invega, the voices and the personality disappeared.

My days now consist mostly of survival and paying the bills. There’s no jolt in trying to build the next start-up or become the next best-selling author. I’m not emotionally dead, but it is hard to care at all. I take Lamotrigine for the moods and Trintellix for the depression. Invega for the psychosis.

I want the old chaotic life back because it gave me certainty for the immediate future. I knew I’d be thinking of ideas or talking to Lucifer or cursing the world in a blaze of glory. Now, I’m old and colorless. Nobody would suspect the high-octane person I once was.

It’s like the days melt together. Just waiting for the next event. Trapped with the memories of what was.

Why is there suffering in the world?

What does it mean to be depressed, bipolar, or schizoaffective?

What category do you place yourself in?

It’s funny because what if we let go of the expectations, the categories, and the labels?

We create categories to make reality understandable.

Religious.
Secular.
Bipolar.
Healthy.
Sinner.
Neurodivergent.
Successful.
Broken.

Maybe categories help us navigate the world.

But sometimes I wonder if they also shrink us.

When does a label help us understand ourselves, and when does it become a cage?

I could say I’m schizoaffective, or I am bipolar. But does that actually serve me?

I don’t go to people and say, “I’m Barnaby, and I’m bipolar.”

That would create an easy way to assign an association of what a bipolar person should act like.

I don’t fit the stereotype people imagine when they hear words like schizoaffective or bipolar.

Most people probably wouldn’t even know unless I told them.

Sometimes I wonder if people are less static than we think.

One moment, a person is depressed.
Another moment, they’re laughing with a friend.
One year, they’re suicidal.
Another year they’re writing, working, walking their dog, and trying again.

Human beings seem more fluid than the categories we assign to them.

I know for me, I was going to kill myself 5 years ago, and I survived. Since that moment, I’ve laughed, made new friends, and reflected.

The label of schizoaffective has helped me get treatment, but it doesn’t serve me to share with others that I have a chronic condition.

I am Barnaby Alkire. I live with a chronic, potentially debilitating condition.

However, just because I live with it doesn’t diminish the value I offer the world.

At the end of the day, I’m thankful for my story. If I had to do it all over again, I’d wouldn’t change anything.

Living with a mental illness has taught me a lot and has given me empathy for others who are struggling.

I’m stable. I can write. I have an able body. Yes, does the car being out of commission suck? It does, but it’s a lesson.

And who knows, it could have been worse. I could have gotten injured or lost my life, and yet I’m still here writing to you.

I think what’s important is contextualizing suffering. Right now, I’m suffering without a car, but I’m not manic or in psychosis.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

It’s my attitude towards life that keeps me going. It can never be taken away from me, and it keeps me going.

Whatever label you live with, you choose your own way by the attitude you live with.

I don’t even feel like writing this today, but I want to highlight what I’m experiencing in my head and share what’s going on.

It seems like I’m headed into a depression right now.

Yes, I’m taking my meds.

I feel slow, and I don’t have a lot of hope.

This car accident, the new job, and the ability or lack of it to have independence. All of that is catching up to me.

Despite all that, I went ahead and started a GoFundMe fundraiser.

You can find the link here.

I’m trying not to isolate or give up.

I’m trying to stay proactive instead of shutting down.

Depression is strange because from the outside, people can think you’re just tired, lazy, or unmotivated.

But depression feels heavier than that. It feels like your mind slows down and your perspective narrows. Things that normally feel manageable suddenly feel overwhelming.

Simple tasks can start to feel exhausting. Hope becomes harder to access. Even the future can begin to look smaller.

For me, depression does not always feel dramatic. Sometimes it feels quiet.

It feels like losing emotional momentum.

I’ve learned over the years that stress compounds. The car accident, the financial pressure, losing independence, trying to prepare for a new job, and the uncertainty surrounding everything all started stacking on top of each other.

And when you live with a disorder like schizoaffective disorder, those stressors can hit harder.

That’s why I pay attention when I notice myself slowing down emotionally and mentally. Years ago, I probably would not have recognized the signs until I was fully submerged in depression.

Now I can feel the shift happening earlier.

That insight matters.

One of the biggest dangers with depression is isolation. The mind starts telling you to withdraw, shut down, stop talking to people, and disappear into yourself.

I’ve done that before, and it only made things worse.

So even though I feel overwhelmed right now, I’m still trying to stay connected to people. I’m still writing. I’m still taking my medication. I’m still going to counseling. I’m still praying.

I’m trying to keep moving, even if it’s slower than usual.

I think one of the hardest things about depression is that your feelings start presenting themselves as objective reality.

Your mind tells you:
“This is permanent.”
“Nothing is going to improve.”
“You’re stuck.”
“You’re failing.”

But feelings are not always reliable narrators.

Sometimes depression is not a sign that your life is over. Sometimes it’s a sign that your mind and body are overwhelmed and need support, structure, rest, and patience.

I’m still learning how to live with all of this.

But I’m also learning that living with a mental health condition is not about becoming perfect.

It’s about learning how to stabilize before you completely fall apart.

And right now, that’s what I’m trying to do.

To be honest, I feel like escaping and getting drunk.

I know I’m not going to, but I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you the realness of my situation and how I feel stuck right now.

I’m trying to think about a verse or verses since I’ve now aligned myself with Christianity. Even though I feel this way, I know God will provide.

Yes, I said I wanted to get drunk and put a Band-Aid on it.

I don’t know. But here are some verses that Chat GPT gave me, it’s 2 Corinthians 4:8-9:

⁸ We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; ⁹ persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.

And then there’s Psalms 34:18:

“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”

And Isaiah 40:31:

“But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength…”

And lastly, Psalm 42:11:

“Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?”

Today is a reminder to myself to just keep my head down and keep persevering.

I hope this helps. Maybe next week it’ll get better.

~Barnaby