I used to ponder who I really am; today I just ask who I am for now

By David McElroy · June 7, 2019

Most of us are driven to define who we are. We’re not quite comfortable if we can’t put labels on ourselves. We want some feeling of certainty.

I’ve struggled with my sense of identity over the years and I’ve talked about it several times. Eight years ago was the first time I tried to explain what I had gone through in this regard. That article was my first attempt at explaining how I got from being a broken businessman whose company had shut down to being someone eager to create art. It was my best understanding at the time of what I had gone through.

I’ve come to understand so much more since then, though, that I now see that I was asking the wrong questions back then. From the depths of my depression after I shut my company down, I was asking myself, “What am I?” I was asking myself, “Who are you, David?”

I had been a journalist. Then I had become a businessman. Because my company had shut down — which I finally explained last year was because of my father — I felt like a failure. Just being a journalist no longer felt big enough. I felt like a failure as a businessman, so I thrashed around in depression trying to find some new definition of who I really was.

I now know my questions were wrong, so I was destined to find the wrong answers. My understanding of my own story keeps changing.

In that year after my newspaper company shut down, I spent hour after hour in the depths of depression, asking myself who am I and what I need to do now. I was still thinking — unconsciously, at least — that there is one label that describes who each person is.

I was still thinking back to the question that everybody used to ask when we were growing up: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I thought that question had one answer. I thought that successful people picked one course of action and stayed with it — doing brilliant and amazing things from a plan laid out in their minds when they were about 16 or 18.

I had had such teen-age plans. I was going to have a grand future. Bits of it were fuzzy, but I was going to become a political leader. I was going to be such an amazing leader that I would be elected president of the United States at an early age.

I flirted with being an engineer. For awhile, I wanted to invent things. Then I wanted to be a lawyer. For awhile — still in high school — I was going to go into the ministry. Then journalism was thrown into the mix.

In college, everything interested me. I was pulled to history, political science, psychology and half a dozen other things. At the time, I felt guilty for not having one narrow focus and sticking to it. I had an unspoken belief that successful people stick to one specific narrow path and had specific, narrow interests. I thought successful people had to be specialists.

I understand now that my questions along the way should’ve been very different. I should have been asking who I was for that moment — and I should have been asking myself what I needed to do at that moment.

There is no one right answer for all time.

I am a radically different person today than I was 10 years ago, but my temptation — even now — is to assume that what I am now is what I will remain. I’ve been challenging my assumptions about this lately. My experience and my understanding of the world lead me to believe that changes in who I am will actually accelerate in the future.

The idea that I’ve finally arrived — at any point in my life — is ridiculous fiction brought on by bad ideas we were taught as children.

It’s probably easy for you to look back 10 years into your past and see how much you’ve changed, but when you extend the line into the future, you are probably making the same mistake that I made. You are probably assuming that what you are now is “the real you” and that your major changes are finished.

We all know that most of the cells of our bodies are replaced over time. Cells of certain parts of us last only days, others for months, still others for years. Very few cells in our body — just brain cells, as far as I know — are with us pretty much all of our lives. We might look essentially the same from the outside, but we are constantly shedding discarded pieces of ourselves and replacing those pieces with new cells.

The changes to who we are on the inside is much the same. There are very, very few parts of us that don’t change, yet we are fooled into believing that whatever we are today is (or ought to be) who we really are.

The truth is that we are nothing but a constant series of “nows,” always a little different. What this means is that we are not bound by our past decisions or past actions or past beliefs. We have the freedom to decide who we are — for today — and then to continue adjusting our course until we’re finally happy with what we’ve become.

Understanding this, I am excited to think about the person I will be 10 years from now, because I believe every change that I’ve gone through has brought me one tiny step closer to becoming something amazing that I can only dimly perceive today.

If you had asked me when I was a young man what I would become, I would have seen almost none of what I’ve gone through and I would have seen almost done of the improvements I’ve made by this point. I look forward to seeing what the future brings to me through growth and change.

(This is also a reminder that the only life partner worth having is one who is also committed to traveling a path of growth and change together.)

Am I a journalist? Yes, I still am. I can’t help it. When I see stories around me, I often can’t stop myself from reporting them to you. It feels natural to use my old training.

Am I a businessman? Yes, I still am. Even when I work for someone else, I still think like a businessman, which is why I’ll be my company’s broker soon and then will do bigger things after that.

Am I an artist? Yes, I still am. I can’t help it. I still have to create. I still have to “make things.” I still love beauty in a way that defies explanation.

I’m a lot of things. I’m a thinker. I’m a historian. I’m an educator. I’m a writer. I’m a photographer. I’m a scientist. I’m even still a filmmaker. In all sorts of informal ways, I can’t help being all sorts of things. I don’t need to have one way to describe myself. I just have to follow what’s right for me — at the moment — and it will take me to places which I can’t currently imagine.

Everything I’ve done — and everything I am — mixes together to make me something for which there is no one specific word.

I’m just me.

And that is liberating.

I used to think I was a failure unless I could tell people exactly what I am in one word. I know better now. I’m not a failure at any of the things I’ve done, even though I’ve sometimes felt that way. I’ve just been laying a foundation for becoming something far broader than I ever conceived in the past.

I like what I am today far better than I liked myself 10 years ago, much less 20 or 30 years ago. I’m finally confident enough to know I’ll like what I am far better in another 10 years or 20 years or 30 years.

I’m more excited about my future now than I’ve ever been.

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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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