If you listen carefully, your heart will tell you what you really need

By David McElroy · January 28, 2018

By the time I finished showing houses late Sunday afternoon, I was exhausted and starving. It had been a busy weekend and I suddenly realized I hadn’t eaten all day. But what did I want?

I felt a gnawing craving inside. It was a familiar craving, but what was it for? Was it for steak? Pizza? Chicken? I genuinely felt confused.

I’ve gone through this odd process a thousand times before. I’m hungry but everything I think of feels wrong. I stopped at a couple of restaurants, thinking they might be what I needed, but each time I stopped, I felt a cold emptiness — because I realized what I needed wasn’t inside.

I started feeling more agitated. It wasn’t sugar I was craving, was it? I haven’t had anything sugary for about the last five weeks — since the gallbladder pain started — so that was out of my system, but I was so frustrated with my inability to name what I was craving that I considered maybe something sweet would calm the storm inside.

Then as I sat silently in the parking lot of the third restaurant I considered — with the dull realization that the food there wouldn’t fill my craving — a wave of emotion suddenly swept over me.

Yes, I was hungry, but that wasn’t what I was craving.

This wasn’t about food. It was about her. My emotions and craving and physical needs were all confused.

I didn’t need any special food. I didn’t need to give myself a treat. I didn’t need all the things that my agitated mind had been offering.

With blinding emotion, I realized that I simply wanted to talk with her.

I wanted to see her.

I wanted to touch her.

I wanted to sit down with her and eat … well … something. It didn’t matter what. It was her that mattered, not the food.

My rational brain kept giving me food choices, but it was leading me astray. It was pushing me to fill my craving with the only things it knew to give. Yes, I was hungry, so that approach seemed rational.

But it wasn’t until I told my brain, “No,” over and over again that the emotions surfaced clearly. It wasn’t until then that my chattering monkey mind was quiet enough that I could hear that voice from my heart:

This isn’t about food. It’s about her.

I picked a place to eat, almost randomly. It didn’t matter what I ate. I knew that after I started listening.

The food was OK. The music was too loud. The people were too noisy and intrusive. When you can’t have what you need, almost anything can feel alienating. I just wanted to go home and be away from these people.

My brain constantly misleads me. That’s why I’ve spent so many years using food to try to fill unfulfilled needs. My brain offers me what it has available — and it tries to silence the voice in my heart that attempts to point out what I really need.

I can’t have what I need today, so my brain thinks it’s best to push those feelings aside and fill the need with something — almost anything — that’s available. There’s a certain cold logic to that, but it leads to somewhere I don’t need to be.

We like to count on our brains. We like to do what seems logical and reasonable. That’s what we tell ourselves.

But the truth is that our hearts know what we need. Sometimes we need to be less attentive to that constantly chattering monkey mind inside our heads. Sometimes we need to stop the chatter and the rational options.

Sometimes we just need to listen to the voice in our hearts. It knows what we need — and it will tell us clearly when we have the courage to listen to the truth.

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When I first discovered the idea of unschooling, it was so radical that I had trouble finding people who even knew what it was. Today, the idea is mainstream enough that major media outlets sometimes cover the topic in a favorable way. The Sunday newspaper supplement called Parade had a strongly favorable article about unschooling a couple of weeks ago which explained what it is and how it’s different from homeschooling. It’s less structured. There’s no curriculum. There’s plenty of flexibility. And there are no tests and grades. (Most people today are shocked to learn that testing and grading didn’t exist in schools through history until the last couple hundred years.) If you want your children to think for themselves instead of following the herd mentality that pervades every school I’ve been part of, you owe it to yourself — and to your kids — to consider taking control of your children’s development back from governments. Just because you and I survived institutional schools doesn’t mean it’s the wisest choice. Start by reading the Parade article. It might open your eyes.

In the Birmingham suburb of Hueytown, the Golden Gophers of Hueytown High School had just defeated the Eufala Tigers in the second round of the state playoffs Friday night. It’s not a game that will mean a lot to anybody outside those two communities, but it meant everything to the players and coaches involved. After the game, Hueytown defensive coordinator Trent Campbell was celebrating with his victorious players when he noticed Eufala offensive lineman Dallas Ingram distraught and alone. Campbell left his players to console the distraught Ingram and photographer Dennis Victory caught photos of the pair together. “My reaction was to go see about him, because I’ll see my guys on Sunday and next week and the rest of their high school careers, but that’s a young man we watched on film for a week and studied and he’s a fantastic player,” Campbell said later. “And it wasn’t too long ago when I played my last high school football game and I know what that feeling is and you sort of never forget that. I went to tell him what a great player I thought he was and what a great game I thought they played and I wish nobody had to lose that night because it was an incredible game.” This is what sports at the high school level should be about. Winning is great and winning is fun. But humanity and decency last longer.

I have changed radically about some things over the years, but probably none of those changes have been as great as the ways that I feel about people who are viewed as evil or criminal. When I was young, I was eager to see criminals or foreign political enemies killed. Today, I don’t view such people though rose-colored glasses and I don’t view them as blameless folks who are going to turn their lives around if we just think happy thoughts. But I can’t celebrate the death of anybody, even if he might deserve it in some ways of thinking about it. Even if it’s sometimes necessary to kill someone — and those cases are often debatable — I regret the death of someone who will now never have a chance to discover love and change his life. There are some evil people in this world, but I can’t celebrate their deaths.

There was a time when I was idealistic enough to believe that if a writer expressed his thoughts clearly and simply enough, any bright and honest person would understand his point. I know better now. We all bring so many unconscious assumptions to the things we read that we often see what we expect to see instead of what the writer intended. This is incredibly frustrating to me as a writer, but I’m trying more and more to just say what I need to say — as clearly as I know how — and then ignore the inevitable responses which show that others perceived something which was not intended. I have to write for those who “get” where I’m coming from, not for those who see my words through personal filters that change my meaning. I hope my intentions are clear to you and I hope what I write can be useful to you, but if not, maybe my work just isn’t right for you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I found out this evening that someone I casually knew killed himself last Wednesday. I didn’t know him well — and I never found him personable — but he had started work a couple of months ago at a restaurant where I go. He was a 26-year-old who struck me as a confused and unhappy person, but I didn’t think much about it since he stayed to himself and resisted my efforts to chat with him. It turns out that he had a history of depression and had a lot of gender confusion. He seemed very androgynous to me and I learned today that he presented himself as female in some situations. He was rejected by a romantic interest last week, so he went to the woods and killed himself. His body wasn’t found for three days. It’s tragic how miserable people around us can be and how we so rarely know the truth about things they struggle with.

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