Becoming who we’re meant to be is the hardest battle of our lives

By David McElroy · May 8, 2019

When I look at who I was in the past, I barely recognize myself.

It doesn’t matter how far back I go. The only constant has been change. There are times when I feel happy about that, because I think I’m a better person than I was as a college student (such as in this photo) or a young newspaper editor or as a publisher or as a political consultant.

When I look back at myself in the days when I filled those various roles, I know I’ve grown tremendously. I’ve learned more about myself. I’ve learned to love other people better. I’ve gained enough wisdom to see through things which I blindly believed because my culture had told me to believe them.

I feel good about coming as far as I’ve come. And yet there are times — such as right now — when I wonder if I’ll ever become the person I’m supposed to be.

It’s almost 1 a.m., but I’m out for a walk with Lucy on the darkened streets of our neighborhood. It’s a beautiful night with 67-degree temperatures. It’s quiet. There’s nobody except Lucy out here to interrupt my thoughts.

But in the silence and beauty of the dark night, I find myself full of regret and self-reproach. I think about things I still don’t do well enough. I obsess about mistakes and failures, large and small.

And I find myself feeling a creeping sense of dread that’s always been with me.

Am I ever going to be good enough?

Am I ever going to become the person who I was intended to be? The person I’m capable of being?

Those feelings conjured a song a few moments ago which I probably haven’t heard since I was in college. I used to listen to the words of this song and obsess about them — because I understood the angst and fear that were reflected in this song from Michael W. Smith’s very first album:

Who do I hope to finally be?
Is it not your life in me?
Yet the how’s too hard to see
Too many times

Will I ever finally be
The true, intended me?
Will the old in me be freed
And left behind?
— Michael W. Smith
“Too Many Times,” 1983

I don’t enjoy this sort of self-doubt. I prefer the times when I’m charging forward with absolute confidence and a sense of holy mission. Those are the times when I still get a glimpse of the person I thought could change the world. If I can’t rebuild everything — as I once arrogantly assumed — I can at least set part of the world on a better path.

But this part of me that I experience tonight — the self-doubt and regret, the will to somehow perfect myself, even though I know that’s impossible — this is an important part of who I am. It’s an important part of what has made me willing to throw away the self I have been when I’ve realized I needed to reshape that person to be more like the intended me.

And so I seem to be part of an eternal see-saw that takes me from doubt to growth to confidence and then back to doubt. I don’t like some parts of the cycle. I don’t like the inner critic who constantly pushes me and constantly tells me I’m not good enough. Maybe this isn’t even healthy.

But I don’t know any other way to get from what I once was to where I am today. And I fear that working through this vulnerable cycle — over and over again — is the only way that I can ever hope to become who I was meant to be.

Most people seem to reach a point fairly early in their adult lives when they quit growing and changing inside. My rule of thumb based on observation is that it typically happens around the age of 30. A bit earlier for some and a bit later for others.

But most people end up getting stuck at some point. They become all they intend to become. They assume what they are is good enough. They accept whatever success they have in the world and stop wondering whether there’s more to life than just producing more and making more money.

It seems to me that most people never become what they were intended to be. I think they unconsciously give up. They reach a point at which it’s easier to just keep passively floating around in life, constantly repeating the same things they’ve done over and over. Never growing or changing.

I understand why someone would choose that. I can even understand why so many people never even know what they’re doing to themselves — how they never know they’re giving up on their real selves.

I get that. Because becoming your real self is hard work.

It’s scary. It’s vulnerable. It’s painful. It can constantly re-arrange your sense of identity.

But the alternative is far more frightening to me. The only alternative is to become stagnant and to start dying — emotionally and psychologically. I know plenty of people who start dying in their 30s and spend the rest of their lives just waiting to retire and then die.

I’m back at home now. I dictated most of this to Siri as Lucy and I walked. Now we’re sitting on the front steps of our house, interrupted by nothing other than birds in the trees above and the occasional train in the distance.

There’s so much more to life than most people ever find. I haven’t found all of it. I doubt I ever will.

I just know that I am driven to keep diving down into the deepest parts of life — and into the deepest parts of myself — and to keep struggling to bring back the best of what I can discover.

This process isn’t always easy. It’s frequently scary. It often leads me into the unknown.

But this is what life is really like. This is what growth is like. This is what it’s like to become closer to who I was meant to be.

And it’s far better than becoming a stagnant, miserable shell of a person and just waiting around for death to finally arrive.

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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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