David McElroy

“You’ve certainly been happy,” the woman said. “I can always count on you to cheer me up. You seem like you haven’t got a care in the world.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly. I was in the middle of a conversation with someone who I see a couple of times a week. She’s bright and mature enough — at least 50 years old — to have experienced a lot of life. She’s no dummy. As a restaurant owner, she deals with people constantly — and she knows me pretty well from our frequent conversations.

We had been talking about how it’s easy to tell how unhappy some people are. She chose me as the counter-example to make her point. She said I always seem especially happy.

“What makes you think you know me?!” I wanted to scream.

It was an oddly alienating moment for me Friday night when this happened. Instead of lashing out, I just asked why she thought what she did. Then I briefly told her I’m actually quite miserable lately.

She thought I was kidding, so I dropped it.

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Thanksgiving has taken on an entirely different meaning for me lately. Three years ago, I was in the midst of intense love — something I thought was going to last for a lifetime. And then it was over in a flash, leaving me bewildered and hurt.

Each time Thanksgiving week rolls around now, it brings a bittersweet swirl of intense feelings — a remembrance of sweet love mixed with the bitter pain of loss. I’m not sure which feeling is stronger, but every bit of it is powerfully intense.

I was lost in my thoughts as I left the office for lunch today. Since it’s two days before Thanksgiving, few people are on campus, so the lobby was empty and silent as I walked through.

As I was about to step out of the building, I realized someone else was approaching from the other side of the lobby, so I absent-mindedly held the door as this woman approached. Then I noticed it was someone I hadn’t seen lately.

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Why is it that the seeds of some people’s destruction are found in their greatest strength?

I’ve been wrestling with this question for a long time now. As I’ve gone through a low part of my life for the past four or five years, I was under the impression this had been a very recent thought for me. But last week, I found a note from myself dated April 11, 2008. It simply read, “Seeds of destruction? Why is it that the seeds of some people’s destruction are found in their greatest strength?”

I don’t remember having this thought back then and I have no idea what prompted it, but it struck me strongly enough to write it down. Almost 10 years later, it seems as though I had half of an insight back then — and maybe I finally have the other half of it today.

For most of my life, I’ve been fascinated with personality and how it affects different people’s actions, but I think I’ve had something backward for all these years. In fact, I suspect most of our personality systems have something fundamentally wrong. We focus on our apparent strengths in order to allow us to “outrun this humanity” inside — the messy parts we are so ashamed of.

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