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.

&lt;span data-mce-type=”bookmark” style=”display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;” class=”mce_SELRES_start”&gt;&lt;/span&gt;

Share on Social Networks

I just found out that a long-time Facebook friend died a few days ago. I never met Tom Ender, but reading his posts and interacting with him over the years made me feel as though I knew him. He was a kind and gentle man who was also a fierce and principled individualist. When his long-time wife, Julie, died several years ago, it broke his heart. About a year ago, he posted an old photo from their wedding long ago and wrote, “18 months ago, Julie passed from this world. I believe we will meet again, though I don’t know details of how.” As I mourn the death of this gentle and brilliant man, my fondest hope is that he and Julie are together again by now. Goodbye, Tom.

When Francesca Montanaro’s school shut down in March due to fears about the new new coronavirus, she had nowhere to go. Francesca’s mother is a nurse working long hours in New York City. The grandparents who would otherwise have provided child-care were old enough to be vulnerable to the bug, so they were out. That meant Francesca has spent the last few months with her dad at his pizza shop in the Bronx. In this six-minute piece from Radio Diaries and NPR, we take a look at what it’s been like to be a bright and typical 11-year-old thrust into a completely different world. She puts pizza boxes together and answers phones. She’s even learned to make perfect pizzas. I found the story touching. It reminds me of the degree to which children used to learn more about the real world than they do today. Even though she won’t follow in the pizza-making footsteps of her father, I’ll bet this will be one of the defining experiences of her childhood, one that she will treasure for years to come.

I noticed three instances over the weekend of people talking about Donald Trump’s “campaign of hate.” I wanted to correct them — because they misunderstand this narcissist — but I knew they wouldn’t get my point. It’s not that I’m defending him, because what he does is worse than hate. You simply have to understand the way narcissists think to understand him. Trump doesn’t hate. It’s worse than hate. He’s indifferent and angry with anyone who doesn’t obey him and worship him, those who don’t give him what’s called “narcissistic supply.” People believe that Trump hates blacks or Hispanics or foreigners or whatever group which he’s seen as hating. It’s true that he experiences rage at people who will not give him what he wants, but he’s not in touch enough with his real self to feel real hatred, much less to feel real love. He’s like a vampire who sucks all the available praise and adoration from any group of people — any way he can get it. He doesn’t love rural, blue-collar white folks, but their adoration gives him what he craves. He’s not emotionally mature enough even to hate. For a narcissist, people are simply objects to manipulate, depending on what he can get from them. Trump’s indifference is far worse than hatred. This isn’t ideological or political. It’s pathological. He’s not mature enough to hate.

The decline of modern culture can be seen clearly by looking at what passes for public discourse. There was a time when people who wanted their ideas accepted made rational arguments. It was assumed that most people were bright enough and rational enough to evaluate those arguments — and a surprising number of them really were. Today, the arguments are made in the form of irrational and simplistic graphics called “memes.” Because these graphics can’t convey complex or nuanced information, they present dumbed-down presentations of positions which are stunningly juvenile and seem designed to offend rather than to convince. We have regressed from books and dense pamphlets to a level more like that of angry kindergartners making crayon-scrawled hate notes to send to other children. Reason no longer plays a role in public discourse, and this signals the coming fall of this society.

Lucy just made possible friends with two little girls, but the girls are more enthusiastic so far than she is. Joy, 5, and Hope, 6, just moved in with their grandmother on my street. I didn’t know this, but while Lucy and I were walking, I heard a tiny voice from the darkness cry out, “Hi, doggie!” It took me a minute to figure out where the voice was coming from, but once I did, their grandmother, Rose, came out onto the porch and gave the girls permission to pet Lucy, which delighted the girls. Joy said she wasn’t allowed off her porch since she had socks and no shoes. Lucy was shy, but allowed them to pet her a bit, while the girls marveled about how soft she is. I hope Lucy will let them be her friends. It’s a joy to see how far Lucy has come since she came to live with me. She’s nothing like the “special needs dog” who I was told would never get close to anybody.

Related Posts