As nightmares plague my friends, I’m grateful mine have subsided

By David McElroy · October 4, 2015

Nightmares always end, but when you’re in the middle of one, it seems as though it might last forever.

Last year was terrible for me. For several years, I’d been letting myself slide into a very deep hole. I was depressed. I was broke. I was alone. I was confused.

It was a nightmare that felt as though it would never end. In fact, I didn’t just slide into that deep hole. I fell into the hole and kept digging it deeper and deeper. It seemed as though nothing I could do was right. For the first time in my life, everything felt bleak and hopeless.

But I’ve finally dug my way out of the hole, even though I’ve not really recovered entirely. I’m not where I want to be in life. I don’t have the love or family I need. I haven’t achieved the things I want to achieve. I haven’t become the person I feel driven to become.

I sometimes complain about the things in my life that I’m still unhappy about, but then I see things in the lives of people I care about — and my troubles don’t seem as big as they had seemed before.

• Last weekend, the 16-year-old daughter of a friend in Washington state was riding in a car that was struck by a hit-and-run driver in a stolen car. The young woman suffered serious head injuries and might not make it. My friend has been traumatized, of course. Her daughter had brain surgery but there’s still been serious swelling and she’s remained unconscious. She’s on life support in critical condition. It’s impossible to tell what will happen, so my friend is living in limbo.

• The daughter of a friend in Oklahoma killed herself Thursday. The 43-year-old daughter had been with the same man since she was 17. They have three children together. But she found out he had been cheating on her. Then he suddenly left his family. In her despair and grief, she shot and killed herself. My friend was devastated, especially in light of the fact that another of her children had killed himself 20 years ago.

• A neighbor who I’ve come to love dearly is being evicted from her home. She’s a physician, but she had a car accident last year and couldn’t work for a long time. Because she was away from her practice for so long, she lost all her patients. She didn’t have insurance that replaced the missing income. Her bills piled up and she entered a cycle of debt and despair. Her power is turned off and she’s in the middle of losing her home. Bankruptcy lies ahead for her — and she feels as though recovery is almost impossible.

• Another friend lost her best friend Friday. Ever since her traumatic divorce, she felt as though the only thing she had to live for was her cat, Ruffus. When he died unexpectedly, it sent her into an emotional tailspin, because this feline had been the focus of her emotional survival after the loss of her husband. He was the only one who needed or wanted her. And now she’s truly alone.

I know that problems aren’t really relative in this way. There will always be people with problems worse than mine — no matter what — so I don’t mean to imply that those of us with less serious problems can’t lament our lives not being the way we want them to be.

I don’t mean to say that as long as there’s someone with worse problems, we can’t be hurt and disappointed by things in our own lives. I’m just saying that peeking into other people’s hurts can sometimes put my own problems into perspective.

My life certainly isn’t what I need it to be. But I can still change all of those things I’m unhappy about — and the loneliness and disappointment I feel now don’t begin to compare to the grief some of my friends are feeling tonight.

So while I’m lonely and I’m eager for change in various parts of my life, I’m grateful that things aren’t worse for me. I’m grateful that I’m no longer where I was last year. I’m grateful that I’ve seen such improvement toward getting myself back to where I was 10 years ago.

I’m grateful that I have hope.

Mostly, though, I have strong empathy for my friends, even though I can’t do anything about their pain.

I know their nightmares will end. I know it doesn’t feel that way to them right now. But I know from experience that the nightmare always ends — and the slow process of rebuilding lives can start.

There’s every reason to hope, even in the middle of a nightmare.

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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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