David McElroy

I don’t handle emotional losses well. I never have. And every time I face another loss of someone or something very important to me, I’m a mass of confused emotions.

Tonight, I’m dreading the coming loss of my dearly loved dog, Lucy. Everyone has experienced such loss at one time or another, but even this sort of loss leaves me feeling helpless and scared.

I know why I feel this way, though — and it all starts with my mother.

I loved my mother and she loved me. That’s such a fundamental statement for a human to make that it seems a bit hollow. Everybody loves his or her mother. Every mother love her child. On some archetypal level, that’s true. But it wasn’t always so simple for me.

My mother left my family when I was 5 years old. The truth of what really happened is far more complicated, but as I grew up, all I could really internalize is that my mother abandoned me. I was too numb to what I felt to ask the real questions that swirled inside my child mind.

Did my mother not love me? Was I not good enough for her to want me? What was wrong with me?

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When I was young, I wanted to be great. I wanted to be important, successful and powerful. I wanted to be put onto a pedestal, where I could get the adulation and approval I craved.

I wouldn’t have put it that way then, of course. I just thought I wanted the things my culture presented as normal goals for someone like me. (I understand now the degree to which being raised by a narcissistic father left me craving approval and attention.)

As I’ve gotten more emotionally healthy and psychologically mature, I’ve been surprised to find out that my desires in life have changed. It’s not that I’ve “given up.” It’s not that I’m settling for something easy after failing to achieve things I wanted.

My desires today are healthier and far more likely to make me happy. You see, I want to be ordinary. I want to be a good man. I want to be kind and loving and content with the joy of living an ordinary human life.

But I’ve recently discovered a fascinating paradox. As an ordinary man, I won’t have the things this world and our culture have always promised me. I won’t have wealth or power or adulation. But it turns out that the people who gain what the world and our culture promise won’t have what I have.

They won’t have the peace and contentment and joy of a man who’s living a simple and ordinary life.

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