Life as misunderstood stranger feels like walking through a fog

By David McElroy · January 4, 2019

I was walking out of Walmart Friday night into the 44-degree night air — one of our coldest recently — and I saw a well-dressed and attractive woman, about 30, walking toward the door with her arms folded tightly to her body.

“You look really cold,” I said sympathetically.

“Yeah, I am,” she said and then added in a playful but seductive tone. “Did you want to keep me warm?”

Then she realized what she had just said to a stranger and she looked stricken.

“I am so sorry,” she stammered. “I don’t know why I said that. I just….”

And she suddenly took off for the inside of the store to avoid explaining herself further. It was amusing, but I could feel her embarrassment at having said something vaguely suggestive to a man who she didn’t know — and who she couldn’t possibly explain herself to.

Though I laughed inside, it left me thinking — yet again — how little we understand each other. And it made me think again that living among strangers we don’t understand is like constantly walking through a thick fog.

One night last weekend, my neighborhood was covered with a thick blanket of fog. It was an unseasonably warm night — maybe 55 or 60 degrees — as Lucy and I walked through a fog at midnight that made the streets feel enchanted. There was a strange beauty to how the light and shadows played games with the fog and made the familiar streets look quite strange — like a place I didn’t know. (I shot the picture above about a block from my house that night.)

As I walked in the unnatural stillness, I thought about how odd it was to feel so alone when there were people in the houses all around me. And that made me think about how I always feel among crowds of people.

I feel invisible to strangers in crowds, not physically but on the inside. I’m just another random person walking among them. When we’re a big crowd jostling with each other, there’s little or no communication between anybody. I find myself wanting to pick out someone — anyone who seems something like me — and making everybody else go away.

I feel like saying to this one person, “Please tell me who you are. Please tell me all about yourself. Let me understand you. And will you let me tell you who I am? Will you take the time to understand me?”

It constantly stuns me when people around me think they understand who I am. They see me in relation to the parts of themselves — or even someone else — which I might remind them of. But almost every time I realize someone thinks he or she knows me well enough to offer unsolicited advice, I quickly realize the person has misinterpreted so much of what he or she has seen and heard.

I’m not angry about it, of course. I realize we all do the same things. We all misunderstand what we see and hear in others. We see things that seem vaguely like us and it’s easy to leap to conclusions. And when I realize that, it makes me sad — because it makes me feel terribly misunderstood and alone — but it also makes me yearn for more people who are willing to make the effort to understand one another.

Don’t we all want that? I think we do, but those of us who are less like the norm around us are more sensitive to the realization that we’re misunderstood.

I’ve asked myself why I’m so desperate for someone to know me and understand me. It’s not the desire for admiration of crowds. It’s not a desire for fame. It’s the desire for that rarest of thing in our society today. It’s a desire for real intimacy.

For the most part, it’s safer to be strangers with others. If they don’t really know our hearts and minds, they have less for which to judge us. And if we project the image they expect to see, they’ll like us and assume we’re one of the crowd.

For me, that’s not enough. I wish it were, because I know how to show people what they want to see and how to make them like and approve of me. I know how to charm people and put on the show they expect. (I was taught these skills as a child and I was expected to use them.) But when I do that, those people for whom I perform don’t know the real me.

And that leaves me feeling terribly alone, despite their approval.

I want something more difficult. I want to expose my faults and frailties and weaknesses — openly and honestly — and I want someone to understand me and to think that intimacy with me is worth it. I want someone to believe that I am worth loving — and that I offer something so good that my faults are worth overlooking while I continue to work on them.

All I want and all I need is someone who believes in me, who understands me, who loves me — and who allows me to believe in her, who allows me to understand her, who allows me to love her.

That’s what real intimacy is about.

I know I can’t have intimacy with crowds of people and I can’t have strangers understand me. I know that when I encounter strangers — such as the woman at the store tonight — there’s sometimes going to be misunderstanding and embarrassment.

But walking through crowds of people — like walking through a thick blanket of fog — isn’t so bad when there’s one person who knows you and loves you. That kind of intimacy with one person makes living among strangers completely different and very worthwhile.

That sort of intimacy is like walking through the fog of the world holding hands with someone who you can trust and count on. And that changes everything.

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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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