What do you do when it feels as though your entire world is over?

By David McElroy · August 25, 2017

A human life comes to an end only once, but the spirit can die multiple times. In every life, there are a few painful deaths — deaths of dreams, of relationships, of hopes — that make it feel as though the world has come to an end.

I had to face one of those devastating and painful deaths tonight.

I loved her. I probably always will. Each love of your life feels special, but this one was different. How many hurts will I take to my grave as unresolved pain? Not many. Most losses don’t matter that much in the long run. But this is one that I will think about — and bitterly regret — on the day that I die.

I’ve known her for years. From the first time we ran into each other online about 13 years ago, I knew she was special. I wanted to pursue her at the time, but we went our separate ways instead. We remained the most casual of friends, almost never making contact until a bit more than three years ago.

And then she turned my world upside down.

As we started getting closer a few years ago, I fell in love with her. I fell very hard. She said she loved me, too. We talked about our future together. She said it was what she wanted. But in the end, she wasn’t willing to commit, for reasons I won’t get into here. They don’t matter tonight.

She didn’t say yes, but she never did say no. We would make contact again every now and then, but she showed no interest in getting off the fence.

In the meantime, I tried to have several other relationships, but they didn’t work out, either, for various reasons. Every time something didn’t work, a part of me always believed it had to be because she and I were going to end up together. My heart believed she would choose me — if she just had enough time.

But time finally ran out tonight. She wanted to stay on the fence, but I can’t live with that. My sanity couldn’t survive it any longer.

No woman is perfect. She has her faults, but they’re too few to mention here. She’s brilliant and funny and beautiful. (Like, stunningly beautiful. The sort of woman who turns heads.) She would be a perfect mother for the children we talked about having together. She’s not exactly like me. We’re similar enough that we could be happy and share a lot of things that mattered to both of us, but we have complementary skills in some areas. Even if she weren’t beautiful and brilliant, I would have respected her for more reasons than I can explain here.

If I could design my “dream girl,” she would look and act just like her. The only difference is my “dream girl” would choose me.

I told her tonight that things couldn’t continue as they’ve been. I’ve warned her in the past that things couldn’t continue as they were, so this didn’t come out of the blue. I’ve let her know things with us had to go one way or the other. Because she wasn’t willing to choose one way, I was forced tonight to choose the other.

When I told her the time had come to cut ties, she accused me of being cold. If I could cut her off like this, she said, it must mean I haven’t really loved her.

But when the world is ending — and it’s come time to admit that to yourself — there’s no good way to accept death. Although it was heart-wrenching to say goodbye, I had no choice. And now it feels as though my whole world has ended. It turns out that it was a world I built in my own heart — and it was a world she didn’t have any intention of ever living in.

I suppose things can change for me in the future. Maybe I’ll fall in love with someone else — maybe even someone who will choose me. The rational part of my brain tells me that, but the deeper part of me — the real me who lives in my heart — is wandering around in a beautiful dream which is crumbling before my eyes.

Love is fickle. Life would be easier if we didn’t have to deal with emotions and the desperate need for connection, but life would also be very different. I don’t think it would be a life worth living.

In the beautiful dreams I had built for myself — the ones she once said she wanted, too — I had love. And I had a family to love. Losing that loving connection with her feels like death.

There are a lot of things I feel tonight. Anger. Sadness. Regret. Fear. More than anything, though, I still feel the intense burning of a tiny candle in my heart. It’s just a small flame left amidst the ruins of this dead dream. It’s the love which won’t quite go away.

But as that small and lonely flame burns quietly, I can’t decide whether to protect it with all I have left in my heart or to try desperately to snuff the remainder out.

What do you do when it feels as though your world has ended? It feels like death — and there’s no one to share it with. This is what a broken heart feels like.

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Spring always reminds me how glorious blue skies and green leaves can be. When I was in the second grade, Mrs. Arnold chastised me for using those colors together. She said they didn’t match. Mrs. Arnold had very specific rules about which colors could be used together. We couldn’t deviate from her rules. When I used green and blue together in one of my class drawings, she forced me to do it over, since she said those colors shouldn’t be used together. I was a polite and obedient child, but I asked her why they didn’t match — since God used them together in nature. She was exasperated and told me to follow her rules. So when I see glorious beauty which mixes green and blue — such as this photo I took just outside my office Friday afternoon — it always reminds me of Mrs. Arnold. It reminds me that she was wrong. And it’s a good reminder for us all. There are established rules about a lot of things. Many of those are good rules. But if an expert tells you something and you know he’s wrong, you might need to take a chance. He might be just as mistaken as Mrs. Arnold was.

In the coming months and years, we’re going to need inventive and productive people pursuing things that matter. We’re going to need smart and self-directed men and women who will find ideas and create enterprises that will help bypass the political class and build a new and better society. But everything I see in media right now seems geared toward telling people how to entertain and amuse themselves. The stories are full of advice about what to binge on Netflix and what games you should be playing while you’re stuck at home. We desperately need to ignore this advice and be looking toward building new futures instead. Being passive consumers got us where we are today. It’s time that we reclaim our former role — the one that made this country wealthy — as productive and free people who build far more than we consume. This could be a great opportunity for those who will take it. Turn off Netflix. Put down the video game controller. We need new ideas, new achievements, new goals — not more coach potatoes. This is the time to be thinking and creating and planning for the future that you and I both want.

The better I know myself, the more I realize that my core fault — and the source of many other failings in me — is that of believing on a deep level that everyone and everything in my world must be perfect, especially me. If I had seen any of this in myself as recently as 10 years ago, I would have dismissed it as a small failing that showed up only every now and then, but I now see it as the wellspring from which my other sins are born. It’s such an insidious belief — and one that can look on the surface like a reasonable desire to be good and right — that it’s hard to acknowledge it as the inner cancer it is. But until I understood this, it was always going to be impossible for me to get over my deep shame about my imperfection or to accept the love of another person, because she is bound to be flawed, too.

If it’s not yet spring where you are, you can at least enjoy 60 seconds of spring in the South with me. This was just outside my office late Thursday afternoon. Don’t you need a relaxing break today? See it on YouTube by clicking here.

It pays to be nice to the employees at Walmart — and everywhere else, for that matter. I was just in Walmart to buy some kitty litter when one of the employees called me over with a conspiratorial tone: “Hey, David, do you need some toilet paper?” she almost whispered. She had found a giant package hidden somewhere and she said she had been saving it for someone she really liked. So I’m the proud new owner of 24 additional mega rolls of toilet paper, which are worth something like $748 on the black market. On a more serious note, be good to people when you have a chance, as this employee was for me. And remember that people remember the way you treat them. I wouldn’t have treated this woman and her co-workers a bit differently in the past if I’d known she would someday do me this small favor, but there are benefits to treating people well, even if that’s not your purpose. Be good to each other.

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