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It was dark outside as I rode toward home on the YMCA bus that night, so it must have been fall or winter. I was about 11 years old when I rode that bus twice a week from Golden Springs Elementary School to the YMCA in downtown Anniston, Ala., where I took swimming lessons and played on a basketball team, among other activities, depending on the time of year.

I was sitting at the very back of the darkened, noisy bus looking forward at all the other kids. The song on the speakers at that moment — from the radio, I presume — was the Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You.” I don’t know why the scene is so strongly imprinted on me.

“I’m not like y’all and I don’t really like you very much,” I thought. “I’m all by myself.”

I felt a little bit afraid — not for my physical safety, of course — but I mostly felt completely alone. It’s the first time I can recall ever feeling so disconnected and alone and alienated. And in a very simple and childlike way, it was the first time I felt a yearning to be connected to someone.

It’s the first time I remember feeling so alone that I had a powerful need for love and understanding to fill a part of me that I couldn’t yet understand.

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I have a desperate need to be right — but that doesn’t mean what you probably think it means.

It’s not that I want you to believe I know everything. In fact, I very loudly and clearly confess how little I know. It’s not that I want to convince you that I’m never mistaken about anything. It’s easy for me to confess when I’ve made a mistake. I often go out of my way to explain to someone why I was wrong, even if nobody cares.

It’s simply that I have an incredibly strong sense of what is right and what is wrong — and I am driven by something deep inside me to align with whatever I believe it means to do the right thing. So my desire to “be right” is more of a standard for myself.

If I believe I know the right thing, I am obligated to do that right thing. It doesn’t matter whether anybody else will ever know. It doesn’t matter that there might be no consequences. It only matters that I obey the firm moral compass inside me.

I can look back on my past life and see that this has been the core motivation for my entire life. I must do the right thing, no matter what it costs. I can’t help it.

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Today is my father’s birthday. If he hadn’t died two years ago, he would have turned 90 today.

There was nothing really wrong with him physically when he died. After he went into the hospital where he spent his final weeks, a nurse told me doctors didn’t really know what to do with him, because he had no real condition they could treat.

Six months before then, he had been healthy and active. He had still been dating off and on. He was still meeting women online through profiles on a couple of dating sites. The photo above is a selfie he took for one of those women. (He never was great with technology and obviously didn’t know to look at the mirror and not the screen.)

So what happened? How did a man with no real health issues go from actively trying to find companionship all the way to giving up on life — enough that he stopped eating for months and had become an emaciated shell of himself by the time friends discovered him?

He died of a broken heart. He’s the strongest evidence I know that unhappiness can kill a man — by making him give up on life.

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