Sometimes you’re not ready for a challenge, but you do it anyway

By David McElroy · May 30, 2013

There’s a building not far from my house that takes me back to December of 2004 each time I drive past. It’s not a good memory, but rather one that still gives me shivers eight and a half years later.

It’s the memory of a night I suddenly couldn’t remember what I was doing and freaked out as I tried to do my job.

We were close to finishing the first day of shooting for my short film, “We’re the Government — and You’re Not.” Even though I didn’t really know what I was doing, I was the writer and director, and I was sharing the producer duties. I honestly didn’t know until that day just how little I knew.

Even though the day had been a blur, things had generally gone well except for my car having a flat tire at the next-to-last shooting location of the day. (I rode around on the little “doughnut spare” all weekend because I didn’t have time to fix the tire.) I was waiting for one last prop to come in the mail. It was days late, but we thought it would be there. I ran to my house and it wasn’t there — and it was time to shoot the scene. I didn’t have a back-up plan.

The prop was an old-fashioned hand-crank calculator. It was to be used with glee by the IRS agent in the audit scene. In my mind, it was a key to the scene, because I knew exactly what it was supposed to look like. But it hadn’t arrived. I had somehow mismanaged the process of getting it there — and having a back-up solution — so I started panicking. After quickly driving to a couple of other places in a fruitless attempt to find some other prop, I drove back to the location where we were shooting the IRS scene — the building I mentioned at the beginning.

I went inside to find problems. The owner of the building had decided to toss us out, so the production manager was begging, pleading and lying to get us just a few more minutes. The two actors and the director of photography were waiting for me to give orders for the scene.

But my mind was fried. I could barely remember what was going on, much less what the scene was. I suddenly had no recollection of what we had planned for the scene, much less how I’d do it without the missing prop. I was in full-scale panic mode.

The director of photography was the amazingly talented Alicia Robbins. I pulled her into the next room — away from the actors — and said, “Alicia, I’m suddenly losing it. I can’t remember what our plan for this scene was. Will you tell me what we’re doing before I go in there and embarrass myself?”

Alicia saved me by basically making that scene happen. While they were waiting for me to get back to the location, she had worked out something for the actors to do that didn’t involve the missing prop. One of the actors happened to be a very talented guy by the name of J.J. Marrs. Between the two of them, Alicia and J.J. saved the scene and made me look better than I had any right to look.

Even though the film went on to be pretty successful for a low-budget short from a first-time director, that moment of meltdown has stayed with me ever since. In fact, I don’t think I had been aware of how much it had affected me until I started work recently on my next film, “John Crispin for President.”

For all these years, I’ve been terrified to make another film. I blamed it on everything you can think of. The unexpected success of the first one made me fear that it had been a fluke and that I’d disappoint certain people (one person in particular) if I tried again. I blamed it on lack of money. I blamed it on other things. I did everything in the book to avoid taking another chance, because I didn’t want to feel that horrible feeling of being ashamed of myself for not being prepared.

It wasn’t until after I started working on “John Crispin” that it hit me. More than anything else, I was running from those awful minutes when I felt like a fool and lost the ability to think or remember or do much of anything coherently. I had felt shame, because there’s a part of me that believes I’m supposed to be perfect. And this horrible little meltdown reminded me clearly of just how imperfect I was. I’ve been afraid to experience that again.

Since I’ve been working on “John Crispin,” I’ve realized something. I guess I might have known it intellectually, but I’ve experienced it in a way that felt more real.

I’ve realized that you’re never really ready for the next big step in life. If you feel ready, you’re probably not taking much of a step. You’re probably just repeating what you’ve already done over and over before. You’re probably staying in your comfort zone. You’re probably wasting your life.

I needed to step out of the little box where I’ve been comfortable and take another scary step toward things I said I wanted. I don’t enjoy feeling uncomfortable, but I know I’ve needed to do it. I’ve been playing it safe ever since I made that first short. As a result, I haven’t done a whole lot of things that I’m proud of. Playing it safe lost something very important to me about four years ago and ever since, it’s made me feel that my world was shrinking. I didn’t feel like myself anymore. I felt afraid much of the time.

Since I started work on “John Crispin,” I feel like my old self again. I’m taking chances that I haven’t taken lately, and I know that it’s possible I’ll fall on my face. But playing it safe has made me feel dead. Taking a risk to get what I want is making me feel alive again. The results almost don’t matter as much as taking the chance.

I’m not ready for the project I’m working on. I’m making it up as I go. I’m making mistakes. But I’m doing it even though I’m not ready — and I’m starting to think that’s the only way to do what you really need to be doing.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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