From hole I’ve fallen into today, world is a very alienating place

By David McElroy · February 17, 2018

I’ve fallen into a hole today. Call it alienation. Call it depression. Call it longing. Call it whatever you want. There is loneliness in this hole. There is bitterness. There’s hurt and anger.

I need to stay away from most people today, because I’m not my best self when I’m in this hole.

In a private letter, the writer Edna St. Vincent Millay once gave me this metaphor. She wrote, “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”

I woke up feeling this way — as though I had fallen into a hole during the night — but it was hours before I was conscious enough of it to realize what was going on.

When it was time for lunch, I drove around from place to place, confused about what I wanted. Any time I have this much trouble deciding what to eat, the food choice isn’t the real issue, which I wrote about just a few weeks ago.

For me, depression is always a situational thing relating to unmet emotional needs. It’s in those times when I act in ways that I know are dysfunctional, mostly related to “self-medicating“ with food. As I thought about this at lunch, I realized that I really did fall into this hole last night, because I ate more poorly last night than I have for a couple of months.

Many people have no idea what it feels like to fall into such a hole. When I describe it to them, I get a blank look in return. Others know exactly what it’s like and freely acknowledge it. Yet others recognize a time in their past when falling into such a hole has almost destroyed them, so they prefer to pretend it doesn’t exist.

So we have an odd situation in our culture. Those who fall into this hole feel all alone — and when that happens, we’re painfully aware that hardly anybody else wants to hear about it. Almost everybody else prefers to look away, either because they don’t understand or because they understand too well.

The sense of aloneness is overpowering in this hole. The alienation from the world is profound. It’s not that I think different things than I normally do when I’ve fallen into this hole. It’s that I admit things to myself that I would prefer not to admit — because they’re things that scare me.

I always feel somewhat alone in the world — and I’ve always lived with the feeling that I was an alien among humans — but I normally make myself believe that can change. Maybe it’s just for the sake of my sanity, but I typically believe that there are people like me and that I’ll find them some day — that they’ll understand me and that they’ll want to hear what I have to say.

But when I’m in this hole, I come face to face with the knowledge that hardly anybody wants to hear the things I consider worth saying. I know how to attract a large audience by telling people things they want to hear. When I did that five or six years ago, I had 30,000 readers a day at my highest peak. But then I quit saying obvious things that they already agreed with. I started writing things which were far more personal to me — things which I consider far more important — and I’m lucky to have 500 readers on a good day. Hardly anybody cares.

I’ve become quite pessimistic about the possibility of people — even well-meaning and bright people — ever being able to agree on much about objective reality. Part of that is that we all have our subjective points of view, but a good part of it is that there seems to be some degree of insanity and irrationality that’s built into every single one of us. The thing that makes me feel truly crazy, though, is that almost all typical, normal, stable people assume their version of reality is objectively correct. When I’m able to see different people’s points of view and understand that multiple ones seem reasonable — and that they can’t all be true — I’m confused about why that isn’t obvious to everyone.

And from down in this hole, I also face my worst fear — that I’ll always be alone. That I’ll never find a partner who wants what I have to offer (and who also offers what I want in return). Most days, I can convince myself this will change. In this hole of alienation, she no longer exists.

I realize this isn’t interesting to most people. Maybe there’s absolutely nobody who really cares about it. (Probably, come to think of it.) I realize I’m indulging my need to talk about my fears. I’m down at the bottom of this dreadful and lonely hole and I’m shouting into a void. I honestly assume no one’s listening — and I don’t blame you.

I know I’ll climb out of the hole. Maybe tomorrow. Surely by Monday. I have plenty to get done, so I won’t have much choice. But I’ll just be numbing the feelings temporarily. I’ll just be pushing forward to do what must be done.

What’s worse, I know that until something changes — if it’s even possible for something to change — I’ll be back to avoiding the hole as much as I can for days on end. But I know I’ll eventually fall into it again and I’ll feel depressed and alienated and angry and hurt.

It’s my own personal version of hell in this mortal realm — and I don’t know how to escape it.

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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.

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