David McElroy

I hadn’t seen Angie for several years. When I had first known her — about five or six years ago — she had been a straight-laced college student working her way through a nursing program. When I saw her this week, everything had changed.

The last time I had bumped into her, it had been about three years ago. She had been in a restaurant on a Sunday evening with a group of people from her church. She had seemed happy and content — looking and acting the part of a beautiful young woman with a bright future ahead of her.

This week, though, everything was different. She’s pregnant. She’s miserable. She told me the father-to-be disappeared as soon as she told him she was pregnant. The guy was immediately living with another woman and wants nothing to do with the baby.

A female friend who was with Angie that night started telling me about the man who helped bring our mutual friend to this point. Between the two of them, they painted a picture of a loser — an arrest record, drug habits, bad character, no future — who Angie had put up with for no good reason.

As I listened to their story, things seemed obvious. Angie had lowered her standards a little bit at first. She had lied to herself about what the man was. She let him lead her — one little step at a time — into things that had been completely foreign to her.

And now she’s alone and miserable. She slowly painted herself into a corner — one tiny bad decision at a time — and now she sees no way out of the hole into which she dragged herself.

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I found myself in a time machine Monday night. My body didn’t move, but my mind and my heart were transported to the years when I was a teen-ager.

I didn’t mean to take this trip into the past. I ran across a YouTube video promising snippets of the most popular song from every month of the decade of my youth. I was curious whether I’d know all the songs. It never occurred to me that the music would awaken something disturbing.

At first, I didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary. Then the songs reached the years when I was about 14, 15 and 16.

All of a sudden, I was feeling emotions I had experienced during those years. Some of the sounds awakened specific memories. My mind was a blur. What I didn’t expect was the flood of emotions.

I can talk clinically about the experience of growing up with a narcissistic father and an absent mother. I can outline the ways this affected me, but I almost always talk about it with the matter-of-fact tone of reciting facts.

What I felt tonight wasn’t about reason or psychology or dry narrative. It was a flood of feelings such as fear and shame and pain. They were emotions I was too terrified to openly feel at the time.

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