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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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Does change really come quickly? Or do we finally accept the truth?

By David McElroy · May 3, 2019

When change happens, it can seem like a bolt out of the blue.

It can seem as though we’re heading in one stable direction in life and then something changes without warning — suddenly upending all of our plans and assumptions and hopes.

But is that the way it works? Is the dramatic moment of change what we think it is — a shocking thing we didn’t see coming — or is it just the moment when we finally accept what should have been obvious long before?

I met a young woman earlier this week who really impressed me. When I was eating at a restaurant where I rarely go Monday evening, I kept noticing an attractive server and thinking she looked familiar. I finally invited her over and asked if we might have met.

As far as we could figure, we had never met, but we talked for 10 or 15 minutes. She was delightful. She was intelligent, charming, funny and beautiful. She was tall and had dark brown hair that made her bright blue eyes all the more striking.

I had originally guessed her to be about 22, but she was actually just 17. We talked about where she’s going to college next year and we talked about her fiancé, who’s an older man. She talked quite a bit about him and how great their relationship was. She seemed very happy and eager to marry him after she got out of college.

Late Friday night, I was sitting in a fast food restaurant writing when I saw her coming toward me. She had stopped after work to get some food to take home and recognized me, so she was stopping to say hello.

After chatting for a minute, she broke the news that she and her fiancé have broken up. I was stunned. It was just four nights before when she had been telling me how great things were. I hadn’t seen that coming.

She told me that her boyfriend had a son with an ex-girlfriend and that he had been spending more and more time with that ex. Not just with the son they have together, but with the woman. He had always framed it as spending time with his son’s mother, but it was starting to look different when the two of them had started doing things together again — without the son.

My new friend said she tried to talk with him about it Thursday night and he wouldn’t even discuss it. She said he wasn’t interested in how it made her feel and he made it clear he wasn’t going to change anything for her. They had a big fight and the man suddenly removed all of her pictures from his social media account — and replaced them with a picture of the ex-girlfriend and his son.

As I listened to her story, my first reaction was to be shocked at how quickly things could have changed for her. But the more I thought about it, the more obvious it becomes that this change had already happened — well before Monday night — but she hadn’t been willing to accept it until now.

As of Monday night, she was still talking about how happy they were together, but now that she was telling me the story of how the breakup came, she talked about how the man had been spending time with this other woman for weeks. She had been feeling pain about this for some time.

And then it occurred to me that this wasn’t a sudden change. She simply got to the point at which she had to accept a change which had already occurred.

Our narratives for our own lives tend to be stable. We like to believe we have a story that makes sense and isn’t going to change. We like to believe that this person loves us and that we can count on that friend and that we can rely on financial security because of this other reason. We like this illusion of stability — even when we know deep down that things are wrong — because it keeps us from having to accept change which scares us.

The end of a relationship can seem to shock us for this very reason. We haven’t wanted to accept the upheaval which would come with the end. We haven’t wanted to accept the truth of where we really stand with someone who isn’t capable of loving us in the ways we had believed. We haven’t wanted to accept the many real changes that must happen when we acknowledge the truth.

But the truth has a way of catching up with us. If we have been denying the truth — and desperately trying to believe things are still as we pretend to the outside world — that moment hits us even harder. We tell everybody how we were blindsided, even though we had known deep down that the change was happening, often for years.

When you look at a dandelion — such as this one from my back yard — it looks lovely and solid and even strong. But as every child knows, a simple breath of air blows it apart, making it clear that its image of solidity and strength was just an illusion.

I’ve done this to myself. I’ve known things I haven’t wanted to admit and I’ve ignored them. I’ve known that a relationship was falling apart that I didn’t want to lose. I’ve known that business directions I’ve tried to force were completely wrong for me. I’ve known that I was never going to get love from people whose love I wanted. But because those were painful truths to me, I’ve lied to myself — at least until the moment when reality forced me to accept painful truths.

It’s not just me, of course. And it’s not just my charming young (and heartbroken) new friend. You’ve done it, too. You’re probably doing it right now. Denying reality can seem so much better than the alternative of making the changes which scare us.

But truth always catches up with me. Reality always bites me. The love or career or life path which had seemed so solid is suddenly as fragile as a dandelion in a stiff breeze.

We all need to learn to face reality more quickly. Why? I can tell you from painful experience that the alternatives we should have pursued while in denial are frequently gone by the time we finally accept the truth that should have been obvious for ages.

Sometimes, things really do change in shocking ways. More often, though, we are simply in denial about accepting painful change that we eventually have to deal with.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: acceptance, change, love, reality, romance

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Briefly

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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