David McElroy

If you want to be like everybody else, just imitate the behavior of everyone around you. If you want to be an ordinary family, conform to what you see other families do. If like what you see in the culture around you — and you want to become a reflection of that — act in the ways the culture dictates.

You will become just like the people around you. And you and your children will end up just as dysfunctional as the culture to which you’re allowing yourself to conform.

But what if you want to become extraordinary instead? What if you want your family to have the love, connection and stability you don’t see in ordinary families?

You can choose to be extraordinary. You can be emotionally healthy in a dysfunctional world. You can make conscious choices about what your life will be. But that requires sacrifices. You can’t take the easy way of simply “fitting in.” You have to make hard choices — and it requires you to be constantly at war with a sick and brutal culture which demands mindless conformity.

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The world around me is going crazy right now.

The busy restaurants that used to compete for my business struggle to keep their doors open. For the third time in the last week, I found the restaurant door locked tonight when I went to have dinner. When the next two places I tried were also locked, I went home instead.

It felt as though I had no choice.

After some flooding at our office a couple of weeks ago, I needed to install tile in an office where the carpet was damaged. My flooring supplier couldn’t sell me tile. Why? He can get the tile, but he can’t keep a dependable installer. (At any price.) I had to install a cheaper vinyl plank floor instead.

It makes me feel as though the choices I’m accustomed to having have been taken away.

I wasn’t thrilled when gasoline prices rose above $2 a gallon last December, but those prices sound great compared to the $3.199 price at my “cheap” neighborhood station this week. The price of everything I buy seems to be going up. Of course, anyone paying attention to the massive inflation of U.S. currency in circulation over the last 18 months would expect this.

It’s been obvious that politicians and central bankers have been destroying the value of our money — going back to the creation of the Fed in 1913 and the eventual end of the gold standard in 1971 — but it’s more obvious than ever today.

And I have no choice and no control over any of what they’re doing.

I need the world to make sense. I need people around me to be rational and behave in ways that I can understand. But that’s happening right now — and I find it’s affected me in an unexpected way.

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Personal growth can be painful. I don’t recall a single time when I’ve experienced psychological growth from moments of triumph and success. My growth has always come from profound moments of self-understanding — and those have tended to come from painful insights about my mistakes and failures.

I had another one of those uncomfortable moments this morning. I woke up thinking about a dream I had about a woman I once dated. That’s her above. Something disturbing hit me that I’ve been thinking about all day.

I’ve always had impossibly high standards for myself. The fact that I couldn’t be perfect made any slight error I made feel like failure. My imperfections made me feel worthless. I’ve been trying to deal with that perfectionism for a long time.

What I hadn’t realized until today was that I’ve unconsciously applied the same standards to the women I’ve loved. This has warped my view of these women.

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