Old photos have me thinking about who I was then, how far I’ve come

By David McElroy · September 2, 2018

For a long moment, I stared at the face in the picture, almost as though I didn’t know who he was. I’d found a pack of photos — old-fashioned prints from a drug store — that an old girlfriend had taken of me about 15 years ago.

Oddly, I can’t even remember the woman’s name, but I felt a sudden rush of empathy for my old self — as the face brought back to me where I was in life at that time and what I still had to go through.

I was terribly unhappy at the time. I knew something had gone horribly wrong in my life — going all the way back to childhood — but I had no idea what it was. I was emotionally drifting and desperate for answers.

I had gone through a “friendly divorce” about three years prior to this, but I didn’t know where I needed to go in life. All of the things which had once mattered to me had turned to sand. I was drifting and looking for a way to find meaning again.

I don’t recognize this person. I don’t recognize his goals. I don’t recognize his values. It’s not that I was a horrible person or anything like that, but I simply hadn’t gone deep enough to understand — or even seek — much of what I know to be important today.

In a way, I look back at this face and think I was still a child, at least by the standards of my current emotional and psychological development.

Who in the world was this guy?

I was a political consultant. I made a lot of money. I dated attractive and interesting women, but nobody held my attention for long. I no longer knew what I was looking for. In retrospect, I’d say I was confused, although I’m sure I would have told you I had it all together.

This particular girlfriend — it bugs me that I don’t recall her name — was a model, although she was certainly nobody you would have heard of. Most of what she had done was local print advertising. As she approached 30, she knew her shelf life for modeling would be over soon, so she was trying to move into managing models.

She was convinced she could give me a career in modeling. She took some pictures just to show me. I wasn’t convinced, but she had a professional shoot another batch of pictures later. (I don’t know what happened to those.) She unexpectedly got some life-threatening illness soon thereafter and I lost touch with her before long.

But who is this guy? What was I thinking? What was I feeling?

I’d say I was lonely, but not really from lack of someone to spend time with. I was lonely because I didn’t know myself well enough yet to share it with someone else in the ways I can now. I had never even heard of narcissistic personality disorder, so I didn’t yet have a name for the nightmare which had been my childhood with my abusive father. I had so much yet to learn — especially about how close I came to becoming like him.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the questions we ask ourselves and why those questions make a difference in who we become. (More about that later.) I’m not sure I was consciously asking myself the right questions yet.

This was around the period when I started realizing I had to get out of politics. I hadn’t yet come to the conclusion that the entire political system was immoral, but I had at least come to the conclusion that it wasn’t salvageable. I came to the pragmatic conclusion first and the philosophical conviction would later follow. (Here’s an interview in which I discussed that.)

If I could go back and talk to myself on the day these photos were taken, I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to explain the immense turmoil that was to come in my life as I tried to break out of the unethical political work and find emotional values that worked in the here and now. I don’t think I could have dealt with knowing of the pain that would come from finding love and then losing it two different times. I don’t think I could have dealt with knowing just how low my life had to get before I could start rebuilding it again.

If you had met me on this day, you would have thought I had it all together. I was affluent and confident. I had a beautiful woman who adored me. I had the things that the world tends to find important.

But I hadn’t found the depth — psychologically, emotionally and spiritually — that I’ve found in the years since then. I was grasping for a place to stand. And I had no idea how hard it was going to be.

I’m not yet where I want to be today. I’m not as financially successful as I was then. I don’t have the love I long for. I don’t have the family I so desperately need. I don’t yet have the creative achievements I want.

But I’ve already come through a horrible period of growth. I survived the process of understanding where I came from and what had been done to me. I survived giving up my lucrative career and I survived going through a period of poverty I’d never known. I’ve even survived the painful loneliness of wanting love I can’t have.

I’m closer now than I’ve ever been to what I need to be. I’m closer to being the sort of man who will be a good husband and a good father. I’m closer than ever to being able to do the creative work I always knew I wanted to do.

I don’t know exactly who this guy in the pictures really is. I don’t know him anymore. I feel empathy for where he was — and I am grateful to have survived all that he had to go through to get me where I needed to be.

Now I just need to get back down to the weight I was then. I’m working on that part.

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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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