David McElroy

Demand too much and you may end up empty-handed,
Demand too little and regret is your reward
— Pat Terry, “Truth is Like a Sword,” 1984

I regret that I’ve wasted the last seven years waiting for a phone call that was never going to come.

I told myself that I wasn’t waiting for her. I tried to make myself believe that. I dated a little, here and there, but my heart wasn’t in it. I thought I wanted her. I believed she would be back. She couldn’t have meant all that she said to me otherwise. She wouldn’t have urged, “Don’t give up on me,” if she wasn’t going to finally make things right. So I waited.

The weeks turned into months. The months turned into years. Somehow, I wasted seven years.

Everything changed about a month ago. The details don’t matter. She wrote one day to tell me what I had been waiting to hear. I was ecstatic. Three days later, she wrote back to say she had changed her mind. And, suddenly, everything was clear.

This woman was never going to be what I had needed her to be. Nothing about her could possibly be worth what I had lived with. A switch suddenly flipped inside my heart. Everything was over.

I was finally free. I could see her for what she really is.

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Baseball is no longer the most popular sport in America. But it’s not football, either. Nor is it basketball or golf or tennis.

The national sport in this country is politics. Look at social media if you don’t believe me. Almost everyone chooses a side and passionately cheers for his or her side. Team Red and Team Blue constantly clash in each new political season. There are also some minor teams which routinely lose to the major powers. And the results of these bizarre contests matter almost as little as it matters who wins the Super Bowl.

I spent 20 years working professionally in this “sport.” Before that, I had been passionate about the game as an amateur. And even after I finally got out of the political game — partly so my conscience could rest easily at night — I was still eager to argue with everybody about the game. I was eager to show others where they were wrong. I passionately begged them to adopt a rational and moral view of the game.

But I now understand just how insane that was. I finally figured out why it was a waste of my time and energy. Because I’ve finally accepted that political activism — of any kind — is just as effective as shaking my fist at the sky and screaming that it wouldn’t be right if it rained today.

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If you’re miserably unhappy and you hate where you are in life, I have good news and bad news.

The bad news is that you can’t blame somebody else for your problems. Not forever, anyway. The good news is that nobody else can stop you from fixing your life by changing your future. Starting today.

The choices you made a year ago — or five years ago or even longer ago — have given you the consequences you face today. Even if someone abused you in the past or messed you up through dysfunctional childhood programming, there comes a time when you can take control.

If you haven’t realized this until now, today can be the most important day of your life — because today can be the day when you take responsibility for changing the things which make you unhappy.

It took me decades to learn this lesson. I was so damaged by a dysfunctional childhood that I was in complete denial. Even though I often felt that something was wrong, I didn’t understand what had gone wrong. My confusion and the accumulated emotional damage caused me to drift in life. I allowed my life to fall apart. And it was only through serious self-reflection — and good therapy — that I learned what had happened.

From that point forward, the mess was mine. I could explain the past through the lens of what happened in my childhood, but I know that what I have today is because of my own choices. I’ve made some good choices and some bad choices, but I freely accept that my choices are creating my consequences. For both good and bad.

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