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My mother didn’t appreciate being compared to a ghost.

I was about 21 years old. I had sent a letter to my estranged mother, maybe the first letter I had ever written to her. I didn’t really know what I was trying to accomplish.

I was living in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where I was a student at the University of Alabama. I was troubled and unhappy, but I felt confused about the reasons. I had gone to a psychiatrist for help. He said there was nothing wrong with me but suggested a therapist to help me talk things through.

For a couple of months, I had interesting conversations with a therapist. He had me take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which is a common psychological instrument for discovering hidden psychological problems. The results showed that I was perfectly normal.

He eventually told me he enjoyed our sessions, because he said I was a pleasure to talk with each week, but that he had no idea how he could help me. So I gave up on therapy.

In desperation, I wrote a long letter to my mother.

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We spend most of our lives wandering blindly.

We see the rooms where we live. We see the streets where we walk. We see buildings and people and cars and cities. For most of us, our physical eyes faithfully show us the world around us.

But our real eyes — our spiritual eyes, emotional eyes, metaphysical eyes, call them what you prefer — are closed and blind. We don’t even know they exist. The physical world is only a tiny fraction of reality, but our spiritual blindness limits us. We are just as blind as a sightless man is in our physical world.

All sorts of truth is written in our hearts. Every now and then, we glimpse that. Ever so often, the inner light is so bright that we can’t ignore it. Those are the times when we simply know things, even when they don’t make sense to anybody else.

I spent most of my life blind to what my heart already knew. But as I’ve slowly started awakening, I often feel overwhelmed with what I know. And once a truth is seen, it can’t be unseen.

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I can still vividly see what my fleet of planes looked like.

I wasn’t sure how many there were. I wasn’t even certain what we would use them for. I just knew the company would be so large that it would require a fleet of planes. At least six or eight of them. Not small planes. Huge airliner size. The design was simple but bold. Each plane was a solid color, but each was a different color, bold enough to stand out anywhere.

And each one had the company name on the side. In monstrously huge letters. In a powerful typeface — such as Futura extra bold or Folio extra bold — it just had my name. The company name. It just said, “McElroy.”

Confession is good for the soul, but it’s miserable for the ego. I need to confess these old desires for ego satisfaction, because if I’m not careful, they could return.

And I don’t need that kind of toxic ego in my life anymore. It nearly destroyed me.

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