David McElroy

It was almost 1 a.m. by the time I came out of Walmart one night. I didn’t have many items, but I rolled my purchases out to the car on a shopping cart because I had a huge bag of dog food that I didn’t want to carry. It had been raining hard while I was in the store, but there was a break in the rain while I walked out and loaded the car. Then the rain started again.

The parking lot was virtually deserted and there were shopping carts left abandoned in various places, presumably by people who didn’t want to take the time in the rain to put the carts in the places where they belonged. But I found myself walking the empty cart over to the cart corral — or whatever they call it these days — as the rain came pounding down on me.

As I ran back to the car, I laughed at myself for going to the trouble of putting the cart in the right place in the downpour. I briefly wondered why I bothered. After all, there were plenty of other carts all over the parking lot. Mine would have been just one more. There was nobody out there to see me, so nobody would have even known I hadn’t put it where it was supposed to go. Despite those things, I immediately knew why I’d done it.

I’d returned the cart to the proper place simply because I had decided — at some distant time in the past that I don’t even recall — that I was the kind of person who always put the cart up. I’d seen — and disapproved of — many people over the years who left carts in random places in parking lots. So I’d unconsciously programmed myself. I had decided that I wasn’t like that — and that programming gently led me to walk with a cart in the rain when others wouldn’t.

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For several days now, the U.S. government has been doing its best Chicken Little impersonation — even though we still don’t know exactly where the sky is falling or how it’s supposed to be a big deal.

ABC News quotes a source who says the government doesn’t know an “exact target” for an attack, but then the source admits to not having a clue: “We do not know whether they mean an embassy, an airbase, an aircraft, trains,” the source said.

In other words, the sky is falling, but we have no idea what we’re warning people about. Or where it might happened. Or what might happen.

U.S. senators and congressmen sounded grim but vague when they made the rounds of television talk shows on Sunday. U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) said the danger is “the most serious threat that I’ve seen in the last several years.” Rep. Michael T. McCaul (R-Texas) said, “And I must say this is probably one of the most specific and credible threats I’ve seen perhaps since 9/11. And that’s why everybody is taking this so seriously.”

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I made a mistake Wednesday afternoon. I have a friend who’s gotten married and moved to the other side of Birmingham, so I’m keeping an eye on her nearby house while it’s on the market. When she gets word that a real estate agent is coming to show the place, I go over and make sure everything is clean and ready for showing. If it’s hot inside and there’s enough time, I turn on the air conditioning.

Wednesday afternoon, she called to tell me someone was coming in about an hour. I dropped by the house to check things out. The place didn’t seem especially hot and there were also a couple of ceiling fans running. Since the people would be there within about an hour, I left the air set on 79. It didn’t seem warm enough inside to warrant turning on the air for a 10-minute walkthrough, especially with ceiling fans running. I thought about it, but it didn’t seem like a big deal.

When my friend got feedback from the showing agent Thursday morning, the only specific complaint was that the house was hot and stuffy since the air was set on 79. Most normal people would have simply seen the complaint as unreasonable for the context. At worst, a normal person would have thought, “Oh, I guess I should have turned the air on. I’ll do that next time.”

For me, it was enough to set off horrible feelings of failure and shame. Seriously. It was enough to make me feel as though I’d messed up and would cause my friend to lose the sale. This wasn’t a cognitive process. It was all about deep feelings of being a bad person — of feeling shame.

I’m a perfectionist. I’ve only admitted that in the past four or five years. People had accused me all of my adult life of being a perfectionist, but I’d denied it. And I was certain I wasn’t. If I were a perfectionist, everything I did would be perfect. Right? Instead, I could look at various parts of my life and see how I let some things be anything but perfect.

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