We build our own prison walls, and breaking free starts in heart

By David McElroy · April 9, 2019

This is a day when I want to quietly slip away and disappear.

I don’t want to tell anybody what I’m doing. I don’t want to warn anybody. I just want to cut off the people I’ve known. The people I’ve loved. The people I’ve counted on. The people who’ve disappointed me.

I have these days occasionally. I never know ahead of time when they’re going to show up, but they always feel the same way — and they’re more frequent lately. I always feel like selling everything I own and loading up the car with Lucy and the cats and taking off for a place where nobody knows me.

It doesn’t feel like a desire to run away from a problem or from a responsibility. It’s not a sense of defeat or anything like that. It’s more like a sense of escaping from a prison I’ve built for myself. It’s like a sense that I’ve been waiting in a port for someone to arrive — someone who said, “don’t give up on me” — but that person has never arrived, so I’m leaving to find a new life instead.

On these days, I often hear the words of an obscure old song, one which I doubt you’ve ever heard. From a 1986 album, the brilliant lyricist Tonio K. sings about being held prisoner in this world — maybe hostage is a better word — simply because we need love which we keep hoping to find.

You’ve been a prisoner, babe
Been a prisoner all your life
Held captive in an alien world
Where they hold your need for love to your throat like a knife
And they make you jump
And they make you do tricks
They take what started off such an innocent heart
And they break it and break it and break it
’Til it almost can’t be fixed

That feels oddly familiar to me on these days. It makes me feel vaguely that I’ve been on hold — treading water in life — while I hold out hope that I can be good enough for someone to love.

This is touching on something I’ve talked about many times, but I’m looking at it right now — at least in the metaphorical sense — from the point of view of someone with nothing to lose — someone who has been waiting for something which will never come.

Imagine feeling — in some deeply unconscious way that is only vaguely suggested — that if you’ll merely hold yourself prisoner in a place or time or space that you will somehow receive what you need. And now imagine becoming conscious — just every now and then — that the connection you draw between the two things is a lie. That the reward you hope to have — for patiently waiting — is never coming.

You can’t see your jailer
You can’t see the bars
You can’t turn your head around fast enough
But it’s everywhere you are
It’s all around you
And everywhere you walk these prison walls surround you

And so you realize that you’ve created your own prison. You realize that the things you feel you’ve been promised — especially love — are never going to find you. You realize that you control whether you keep wasting time and emotional energy on a phantom which has kept you believing that today might be the day when you pick up the phone or open a door — and find what you were promised turns out to be true.

And then you realize we’re all in prisons of our own making. It’s not just me. It’s not just you. Even those who haven’t understood the ways in which they’ve made themselves captives are held by forces of their own creation.

And it’s in one of those moments of clarity — on a day such as today — when you realize the only way to break free is to stop waiting — to stop wasting time and energy and years — on promises which turned out to be pretty little lies which tickled your eagerly believing ears.

And then you want to leave everything — and disappear. You want to go free.

Well I don’t know when
And I don’t know how
I don’t know if you’ll be leaving alone
Or if you’ll be leaving with me
But I know
You will go free

I need to leave this place, metaphorically at least and maybe literally. I need to do some things, be some things, travel to some places — lay the foundations that will make me feel that life has mattered.

I need a traveling companion for this metaphorical journey. But not just any companion. Someone who wants to be part of the journey. Someone who loves me. Someone who believes in me. Someone who wants to break out of the prison walls of lies and subterfuge she’s built around herself, too.

Every time when I feel this way, I get closer to an epiphany which will allow me to leave. On a day such as this one, I can feel the walls crumbling. I can almost feel the chains with which I’ve bound myself crumbling to dust. I can feel ready to leave the promises and hopes and lies of the past behind.

I know the day is coming when I will feel this way all the time — when I can step away from the chains and walls which are in my mind — and I can have the freedom to start all over again.

I don’t know exactly what that will look like or what the destination is, metaphorically or literally. I don’t know who will be leaving with me.

But I’m confident the day is coming when I’ll be free. And someone else — I don’t know who — will choose to make that journey with me.

The day is coming very soon.

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I received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine Monday — and I’m happy to report that I’m neither dead nor a zombie controlled by Bill Gates and Co. Eligibility was recently opened in Alabama to everyone who’s 16 or older, so I signed up for the Pfizer vaccine at a site run by a local university. I know this is a political issue for a lot of people, but that honestly baffles me. We can disagree about whether such a vaccine should be mandatory — which I’m against — but as a voluntary choice, it seems like an easy choice now that it’s been safely given to millions of people. Is it a perfect preventative? Of course not. But the decision seemed obvious to me when looking at the statistics and evidence. I haven’t had any of the side effects that some people have experienced, but that’s supposed to be more of an issue after the second dose, which I’ll get on May 3. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if I grow a third arm — or if the secret microchip kicks in and someone starts trying to control me remotely. All kidding aside, getting the vaccine seems like a rational voluntary choice to me.

I get a lot of email from readers. Some of it is fascinating and useful. Some of it is full of confessions that people want to share with a stranger. Some people write to ask advice. What’s really surprising, though, is the small percentage that seems to come from mentally unbalanced people. When I started using the metaphor about being an alien — the tagline at the top of each page here — it never occurred to me that I’d start hearing from people who took it seriously. But every few months, I get a strange email — such as the one above from a few months back — from someone who seems to think I’m claiming to be an actual alien. The first time it happened, I laughed. By the time it became a semi-regular thing, I was simply appalled. For the record, I can provide no proof that I’m an alien, because … well … it’s just a metaphor. I do feel like an alien among human beings, but as far as I know, I’m just as earthbound as you are. It’s just a metaphor. Honest. Or at least, that’s what my lizard-beast overlords told me to say.

After Tampa Bay, Fla., musician Colt Clark had all of his gigs canceled last year for months on end, the entire family felt trapped at home as most of the world was on quarantine lockdown. His wife, Aubree, had an idea that would let Colt make music and involve the whole family in making music videos to share with their friends and family on Facebook. Aubree is a photographer and homeschooling mom to a daughter and two sons, who range in age from 6 to 11. After their friends started asking to share the videos, they made the performances public — and a few of them are now on YouTube, where they go by the name of Colt Clark and the Quarantine Kids. The younger son, Becket, is on drums. The older boy, Cash, plays keyboards, strings and guitars. Dad supplies lead vocals and plays guitar, while 6-year-old Bellamy mostly dances but sometimes does backup vocals. There’s even a dog who makes an occasional appearance. The Clark family has just raised the bar for what I need to create with my future children. And best of all, they seem to be having a great time together. I hope they make you as happy as they make me.

Have you ever wondered how the social media world works for so-called “influencers”? I find it comical, so I thought I’d share with you. I frequently get offers such as what I’m about to describe. And if I’m getting such offers — as a relative nobody in the online world — you can only imagine what people with huge audiences are offered. It starts with an email appealing to my ego: “We came across your online presence and we LOVE your style. We’d love to have you as one of our Brand Ambassadors. To celebrate our new [Brand Name] collection, we want to give you a FREE Watch so you can post a picture of you wearing it and drive more exposure to our brand.” Did you hear that? They love me. They want me to be seen wearing their cheap $59 watch so other people will think, “If this amazing influencer wears that, surely I should buy one.” They even offer me commissions on the watches sold from people clicking from my site. So the next time you see some alleged “influencer” touting something online or on social media, remember that this is what it’s probably all about. It’s laughable.

Modern culture is going insane. The latest evidence comes from the effort to redefine children’s author Dr. Seuss as a racist whose books should be banned. Why? Because a few images in those books don’t meet modern political standards. The drawing you see here is one of those “dangerously racist images,” and it comes from the Dr. Seuss classic, “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street.” The book catalogs all the wild diversity seen by a child on one street, including the offending drawing of a Chinese boy. What’s racist about it? Apparently, it was racist to show the boy eating rice, wearing a funny hat, using chopsticks and (worst of all) having eyes represented by a slit. (The bearded man near him has dots for eyes, but that’s apparently OK.) In other words, the stereotypes are considered racist today. (Oddly, the culture warriors who fret over such things are never concerned if a white southerner is depicted as ignorant trash living in a trailer. Some stereotypes are great, especially if the left hates those people anyway.) Theodore Geisel — the name of the real-life Dr. Seuss — was a product of his time and nobody at that time would have seen any of this as racist. Using stereotypes and exaggerations is how artists depict differences in simple ways. You can argue that it’s better to achieve the end result in a different way, but it’s insane to pretend that everybody from the past should have his work erased because it doesn’t match the preferences of modern leftists. Unfortunately, the company that publishes Dr. Seuss books has caved to the insane people — and six of his popular works will no longer be published. The world has simply gone insane.

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