Destiny in the Mud: An Addiction Origin Story

Destiny in the Mud: An Addiction Origin Story (18+ | Reader discretion advised)

Perversion no longer knocks. It enters casually, shared, reposted, laughed at. It moves through social media as though it belongs there, as though it has always belonged there. And the longer it lingers, the more normal it feels.

This week, I came across a video that unsettled me deeply. Two children were acting out adult roles they had no business knowing. There was no understanding, no protection, no sense of consequence. What disturbed me even more was the presence of an adult who chose not to intervene. Instead, the moment was recorded, shared, and crowned with a laughing emoji, as though there was something entertaining about it.

That emoji stayed with me.

It confirmed something I already knew but had grown accustomed to ignoring. We are no longer shocked by what should horrify us. We have grown desensitized, and the price of that numbness is paid quietly, repeatedly, by children.

That moment became the backdrop for what I am about to share, not as commentary from a distance, but from lived experience.

Last year, while working on a project that forced me to revisit my childhood with honesty, I began to see clearly where my past dysfunction began. Not in adulthood. Not even in adolescence. It started much earlier.

As a nursery two child, barely five years old, I was introduced to sexual behavior by a neighbour. We would go behind staircases, hidden from sight, doing things neither of us should have known. That was my second exposure yep not first, and it did not end there.

I remember being even younger and being kept in another neighbour’s house. I am grateful that I do not remember the details of what happened there, but I remember enough to know that something was wrong.

At school, a cleaner would carry me, kiss me, and cross boundaries that should never have been crossed. At the time, these moments did not feel like incidents. They felt confusing, unremarkable, unnamed. Yet they were shaping me in ways I could not yet understand.

One particular incident changed everything. We were caught by an older teenager. What followed was not rescue but control. There was blackmail, punishment, and fear. He used what he knew to keep me silent and compliant, and to make matters worse, my parents often left us in his care whenever they were not around.

Looking back now at my experiences as a barely 5 year old kid, I shudder not only at what was done to me, but at what might have been done to the other child involved.

By primary school, the pattern had spread. Thankfully, a combination of factors, mostly the church environment I grew up in, helped suppress the behavior. Everything pretty much disappeared out of memory by the time I entered secondary school, it appeared as though all of this was behind me.

But suppression is not healing.

By SS3, hormones were raging and curiosity was everywhere. I was still largely considered a good boy, but in quiet corners, behind the computer room, there were moments of inappropriate touching and conversations filled with curiosity and ignorance. By God’s mercy, I never crossed into fornication, but that was not the end of the story.

Up until that point, I did not even know pornography or masturbation existed. That changed when I stumbled upon some boys reading pornographic comics. Because of the image people had of me, I could not openly engage, so I found another way. I collected the comics and stored them on my phone. That was the beginning.

Exposure slowly turned into curiosity. Curiosity turned into discovery. Discovery settled into addiction.

With it came consequences I did not immediately connect to their source. Depression crept in quietly. Fear became constant. I learned how to live in pretense. Confidence disappeared. Self esteem eroded. Excellence gave way to mediocrity across areas of my life where there should have been growth.

I was fighting demons I did not understand, and I was fighting them alone. I thought it was weakness. I did not know it was trauma replaying itself. I did not know it was a cycle that had begun long before I ever had a choice.

What I did not yet understand was that this was never just about habits or discipline or moral failure. This was the place where destiny first learned how to limp. The mud was not accidental. It was layered slowly through exposure, silence, fear, and the early bending of boundaries that should have protected a child. Addiction did not arrive as rebellion. It arrived as adaptation. It took root as a way to cope with confusion, to quiet memories that had no words, to manage a body and mind introduced too early to things they were never designed to carry.

This is how destiny ends up in the mud. Not through one reckless choice, but through a series of unchosen moments that accumulate and harden into patterns. What looked like desire was often memory. What felt like craving was often a wound asking to be acknowledged. Long before addiction had a name, it had an origin, and that origin lived in untreated trauma replaying itself under the disguise of pleasure and control.

Until deliverance came.

Not suddenly. Not cheaply. But through love, real love, the kind that confronts lies, names wounds, and refuses to let brokenness have the final word.

This is not the end of the story.

What comes next is not about falling, but about rising. Not just about exposure, but about healing. In the next write up, I will explore what liberation by love truly looks like, and how a destiny buried in mud can still be called forward into light, a continuation of an earlier write up on The Sexualization of a Generation.

Because destiny might not begin clean, and falling into the mud is not the same as choosing to remain there..