During the time he abused painkillers, Ben admitted he “started to treat people like objects that existed for my pleasure.”
And for some time, he didn’t feel guilty about doing so—”until I finally hurt one person too many.”
“I don’t want to go into too much detail, but suffice it to say I used a young woman as nothing more than an object for my pleasure,” Ben revealed. “When it was over, I discarded her. I didn’t care about her story or her desire for a relationship that wasn’t just physical and lasted longer than one night. I didn’t care that I’d hurt her. All I cared about was myself.”
Then, one morning, everything came to a head for Ben—though he admitted to not remembering many mornings during that four-month period—when he looked in the bathroom mirror and didn’t recognize himself.
“When I made eye contact with myself, I felt like the devil himself was staring back at me. ‘Oh, God,’ I said out loud. ‘Who is this? This is not the man I ever wanted to be,'” he recalled, adding that he prayed for the first time in a long time and it was “maybe the most honest prayer” he’d ever said, asking, “If you are real, save me from myself.'”
Newly devoted, he was all in. “The drastic change from darkness to light made me, well, annoying,” Ben admitted. “For the next few months I became the classic overly passionate, probably more than a little obnoxious, newborn believer.”
