How Quickly I Forget

I am so frustrated.

I was reading through some of these old posts and found one that said I had been clean for 38 days. My record is longer than I thought it was. I don't think I feel good about that, but perhaps I should. Why do I forget these things?

I have been doing this for a very long time. I have been failing for a very long time. I'm so discouraged!

But I should be hopeful. If I have made it 38 days before, then I can do it now. If I can make it 30, I can make it 60. June 2nd is still a goal and I believe it's still a realistic goal.

I have been making a lot of mistakes, however, and I'm not sure if they disqualify me from my June 2 goal. I think they don't. I hope they don't. It's interesting because they're different mistakes than the ones I'm accustomed to making. For example, instead of looking up inappropriate images, I have instead participated in inappropriate online conversations. I used to do this kind of thing but I haven't in years, and it's been coming back the past few weeks. It's absurd. It's absolutely wrong. I'm done with it though. Not going to do it again. It kinda just sneaked up on me, as temptations sometimes do, and I was ill prepared to resist. I thought the first one was a fluke, so when the 2nd opportunity presented itself, I was also ill-prepared. Never again will that temptation catch me off guard.

It reminded me, though, of how powerful this addiction is, and of how powerless I am to eliminate it. I wonder what else Satan has in his bag of tricks. I know he's going to pull them all out during these three months. And they might be old tricks that I haven't fallen for in a while, or new ones that I've never seen. How do I prepare against those? Especially considering how quickly I forget, some of the old tricks will feel like new ones. Maybe it's a good time to brainstorm how he's tricked me before, old sins I haven't repeated in a while but are related to my addiction...

I need to get better at looking upward. And remembering!