Dear Diary,

Is that how you start one of these things? Dear Diary? I’ve never had a therapy journal before, and to be honest I’m feeling a bit stupid about it. The whole “dear” thing makes it feel like I’m writing “to” someone, but Dr. Hart assures me that no one will ever read this. Not even him. The whole point is that I use it to be aware of my illness, bring my addiction out from under the shovelfuls of dirt I’ve been habitually heaping onto it for the past decade. Uncover it. Hold it in my hands, so that I can understand it somehow, maybe one day find the strength to put it aside. The whole problem is, I guess, that he thinks I’m uncovering and holding up and examining something relatively harmless here. I’m starting out my “therapy journey” with a lie. I’ve told him I think I am a sex addict, which he’s surprised by, me being twenty-five and all. He doesn’t see anything wrong with a guy my age thinking about sex all day long. He was confused by my deep shame, my terror at even coming to see him. But, in truth, Dr. Hart has no idea of the nature of the thing I’m really talking about. The thing that follows me, the friend I made when I was about fifteen, who I didn’t know would be right beside me for the rest of my life. I’m not sure he would treat me if he knew what I really was. There’s doubt in the psychological world that you can even treat people like me at all.

My first therapist wouldn’t even try.

I went to my mother once and asked her to take me to a psychologist. She was standing in the kitchen stirring a pot of stew, losing herself in the motion of it, her eyes downcast and cheeks rosy from the steam coiling all around her, pretty and slim in her nightie. I’d been floating around for a little while thinking I should ask the question. Loitering, trying to work up to it. I picked some bacon out of the rice in the pot next to the stew and Mum glanced at me, cheeky, told me there wouldn’t be any left if I kept going. It was hard to bring her down from the dreamy place she went to when she cooked, created things. She used to sculpt back then. I’d watch her for hours in silence, her slick fingers moving over the slimy gray clay.

In the end, I just filled my lungs with air, counted to three, and did it.

“I think I need to talk to someone,” I’d said. “A counselor.”

“Kev.” Her brow had dipped, eyes shooting to mine from the work before her. “What? What do you mean?”

Her face was a picture of confusion, flickering with panic, the sculptor who sees a wet vase leaning, sliding, who can’t understand why it won’t hold its body like the rest of the identical vases she’d spun, sitting straight on the kiln shelf like soldiers. She was the chef who smelled burning but couldn’t see it, the expectant mother who feels an odd twinge in her belly, the baby shifting suddenly as though stung. What’s wrong with my creation? Or, more accurately, what have I done wrong here? It hurt, to both tell her and not tell her, to make up some tale about being depressed and sit silently all the way to the cold, quiet psychologist’s office without any explanation for her about what she’d not given me, what she’d not said, which moment she hadn’t been “present” that had left me in this state—unable to share with her at all why this clay pot had cracked.

I’d sat in the shrink’s office gnawing my fingernails and examining the certificates on her walls while she stood out in the hall with Mum, reassuring her that prepubescent depression was normal and that she’d probably be able to find the cause of my distress within a couple of sessions. That it wasn’t likely I’d need to be medicated, but it was an option. There’d been some talk of statistics. Of limiting my TV time and increasing my vitamin intake, making sure I got to sleep at a reasonable hour. When the psychologist had come in and shut the door, I’d watched her carefully as she walked to the other side of the desk, smoothing down the sides of her neat black bob, as though she couldn’t possibly chat without knowing every hair was in place.

“Kevin, why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself?”

I’d told her exactly that. A bit. I’m looking back on myself now, on my teen introduction, and smiling. I’d told her about the books I was reading and the video games I was playing, and about my best friend Paul and our bikes. She’d asked me if I was being bullied. How my grades were going. If I was drinking. All the normal sources of a young person’s despair.

I’d been just about dripping with sweat by the time I got up the courage to tell her. She was leaving me long, gentle silences, trying to build me up to it, letting the ticking of the clock on her desk mark the seconds that I had left in the session to spill my guts. I licked my lips and looked at the floor, and when I spoke it was over the top of her as she was posing her next question to me.

“I think I’m a pedophile,” I said.

Her mouth was still formed in a small, tight O from saying “Do you…” the way she’d been saying “Do you…” since we started the session. Do you enjoy getting outside the house? Do you spend much time with friends? Do you ever get angry? But now there she was, stuck on the edge of that “Do you…” because I’d done all the things she’d asked me if I’d done, and now she realized it wasn’t about what I did at all. It was about what I was. She sat back in her seat and looked at me, and her mouth for a moment turned downward, making the muscles in her throat pull tight.

“What do you mean, Kevin?”

The words were tumbling out of me now. I was hardly drawing a breath between long, rambling, stammering sentences. I could feel the heat climbing up my chest, into my neck, a burning rash that lit the rims of my ears on fire. She listened, hands hanging by her sides, lips slightly parted. I was panting like I’d been running.

“What sort of pictures?” she asked. “How did you find them?”

I’d told her about the pictures. My very first foray into my addiction that was not entirely contained within my brain, actual images I’d been sent from someone in an AOL chat room. How I’d clicked from picture to picture, link to link, video to video down a dark staircase into the bowels of the internet, to places most people didn’t even know about. I told her what the pictures were of, described them all in details I knew perfectly from lying in the dark staring at them on my laptop screen beneath the blankets of my bed, terrified that someone might come in and see me with them if I wasn’t covered up. I told her how terrifying and exhilarating it had been to see the images of the things I had been thinking about on the screen, like I’d somehow opened a window into my own mind. The things I’d been imagining, that I’d been sure were impossibilities, depraved fantasies, had actually happened somewhere in the world and someone captured it and now I could see it whenever I wanted, as many times as I wanted. I was Dorothy opening the door on Munchkinland, everything suddenly in color. I told her about how great that made me feel.

And I told her about how awful that made me feel.

How sick and wrong and vile a thing I knew I must be to think about these things and feel relief that they weren’t just inside me.

“I don’t want to do those things,” I said. I was hugging myself now, trying to stop myself from shivering. “I … I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why this is happening. I’ve been wanting to ask someone like you what I should do, you know? I mean, should I be looking at these things? If I’m looking at these things being done to these kids, that kind of means I don’t have to do them myself, right? I mean it’s not like what those people did was okay. But … But it’s like, if they do it, then I don’t have to.”

I was rambling, pleading, and she could see that. But as I kept talking, her face was becoming redder and redder, and a thin sheen of sweat was starting to pop up at the edge of her hairline, on the short, fine hairs that receded to fluff on her brow. And then she did the last thing I thought she would do.

She got up and went out into the hall and brought my mother into the room.

And I sat there and listened as she told my mother everything that I’d just said.

I promised my mother as she sat in the car crying and thumping the steering wheel that I was going to stop looking at the pictures, stop thinking about little children, stop doing those things to myself in the dark and wondering what the hell was wrong with me. Because yes, there was something wrong with me. I knew that. I knew it was wrong. And I was finished with it. I’d got it out of my system, talking to the therapist. It didn’t matter that the therapist wouldn’t see me anymore, had said that she couldn’t treat me. I reassured my mother that there wasn’t a problem anymore.

Lies.

It has been ten years. My problem has never been worse.

I acted on my desire for the first time.