David McElroy

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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My life has been getting better lately — and that’s hard for me to accept.

About 12 or 13 years ago, everything seemed to go off the rails. My financial position fell apart as I walked away from a lucrative career in political consulting. I gained a hundred pounds as I ate loads of sugar to “medicate” my depression after a failed romantic relationship. I felt lost and alone and off-course.

In the following years, I worked at jobs I hated. I didn’t make enough money. I was depressed and lonely most of the time. I no longer had heath insurance. Then I had gall bladder surgery and was left with medical bills I couldn’t pay. My credit was destroyed. Every day seemed like a struggle.

But things are slowly getting better. I’m still not living the affluent life which I had 15 years ago, but I’m doing better financially than I was. I have my damaged credit back up to something decent. I’ve shed nearly 50 pounds since the first of the year. And I finally got some resolution to a long-running romantic drama. I didn’t get what I had wanted for so long, but I finally got a decision on the issue — something which allowed me to finally close that door for good. I’ve needed a final resolution on the relationship and I got it.

I was thinking this afternoon about how much better things have gotten for me. Part of me felt relieved. Part of me wanted to pat myself on the back and tell me I’ve done a good job fighting my way out of that hole. But there was still a part of me which growled that I wasn’t perfect — and that I would never be good enough.

And in that moment, I felt the horrible feeling that I was still in trouble with my father. I felt his judgment. I felt his ever-present programming telling me I had to be perfect. And despite all the good things going on for me, I had trouble believing I could ever be “good enough.”

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“I have often thought of you,” said Estella. … “There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth. But since my duty has not been incompatible with the admission of that remembrance, I have given it a place in my heart.”
— Charles Dickens, “Great Expectations”

About 12 years ago, I almost married a brilliant and beautiful woman. A month before we were to be married, though, I backed out. I broke her heart. And I eventually regretted it.

But by the time I realized I had made a mistake — maybe six months later — it was too late. I told her I had been wrong and begged her to take me back. But I had hurt her and she was already moving on. So she broke my heart.

Over time, each of us regretted throwing away the love we had had from the other. But our timing was off — and our regrets were at different times — so our lives went in very different directions.

I’ve been wondering lately how different our decisions about love would be if we knew what we faced in the future. How often do we carelessly reject love which we later would do anything to have again?

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