What do I really want most in life? Honestly? I want you to notice me

By David McElroy · March 18, 2019

I’ve spent my whole life begging to be noticed — but it took me a long time to realize this.

It was the summer of 2005 when I finally got the finished DVDs of my short film. I was bursting with pride about having made something I was proud of. I wanted my father to be proud of me. I gave him a copy of the DVD and waited for him to say something, but he didn’t say a word.

Several times over the next couple of weeks, I asked him if he had watched it yet, but each time, he said he hadn’t had time. The film was only 10 minutes, so that stung a little. The next time I was at his house — and nobody else was there — I told him we were going to watch it right then.

I played it for him, but he didn’t seem interested. It was an uncomfortable 10 minutes. Afterward, he had very little to say. I felt deflated and hurt. The two dozen film festivals that had accepted my film and the awards it had won didn’t matter. I wanted his praise.

I’ve come to realize that this has been a painful template for much of my life. I don’t like admitting this. I feel as though I’m in therapy again to talk about it. But I’ve spent my whole life begging to be noticed. It’s been a very unhealthy part of my life.

I realized a long time ago that I’m happier after I’ve done something than I am while I’m doing it. With pretty much everything I do — and have done — the payoff for me comes from the approval of people who like what I’ve done — not from the act of creating whatever it is.

It was a surprise to me to discover that most people who loved what they did actually enjoyed the process of the work, not just having done the work and having something to show. That was my first clue that something was amiss in how I looked at my work.

After spending a lot of time looking into my past, I came to see that everything I had ever created or accomplished was designed to get others’ approval, not because I enjoyed doing those things.

When I was in school in my earlier years, I did well because teachers and my father praised me. I was starving for their approval, so I performed exactly the way they wanted me to perform — because that got me their praise and approval.

As I got older, I started taking on projects in school that were conceived as things that were better than what other people had done, not because I wanted to learn anything — but because I wanted to be praised.

As I pursued projects at church while I was in high school, I did things that might make other people think I was special. I wanted their approval. I wanted their praise.

Until I was offered a job at a newspaper, it had never crossed my mind to work in journalism. But after I realized that I could do things that put my name in front of the public — and got me praise from my editors and publishers and the readers — I thrived on it.

(One of my fondest memories of my first months at my first newspaper job was coming to the office one day and finding a note from the publisher telling me I had done a “great job” on a story that mattered to him.)

I have theories about why this developed — and nobody would be surprised at those ideas — but it’s still hard for me to differentiate between what I’m doing because I love it and what I’m doing because it will get me praise.

What would you do if you had all the money you needed to live, but nobody could know what you produce or how you spent your time?

Some people would create gardens or do woodworking or paint or do a million other things. Some people would teach or do volunteer work even if nobody knew they did the work. A lot of people know what gives them joy — from actually doing a thing.

I still don’t know that for myself. I know I want to re-create the world around me, but I’m confused about how much of that is for the sheer joy of creating what I want the world to be and how much is because I want people to praise me for doing something “great.”

When I was a teen-ager, I wanted to be president of the United States. I understand now that it wasn’t because I wanted that job. I wanted the praise and approval that come from masses of people loving me and wanting to give me power. (This is a strong motivating factor for politicians, even though they wouldn’t admit it — and many of them aren’t self-aware enough to understand it themselves.)

I’ve tried to reshape my life in ways that make it more about the pursuit of things I can enjoy doing and less about the emotional excitement of being noticed and praised. But I doubt this will ever completely change.

So I have to admit to myself — and to you — that I want you to notice me. I want your approval. I want your admiration. I wish I didn’t need these things, but I do.

I want these things from the public. I want these things from friends and co-workers. More than anything, though, I want attention and approval and love and understanding from someone who loves me.

I’ve been chasing the satisfaction of that need all my life. I understand it more than I used to. I’ve made progress in getting my self-image from myself instead of from others. I’ll continue to work on all of these things, because I want to be the most emotionally healthy person I can be.

But in the end, one simple fact remains. I need you to notice me. I need you to approve of me and understand me. And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

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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.

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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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