If I look closely at my old self, there’s a lot which is now dead

By David McElroy · June 23, 2019

Did you ever play Angry Birds on your phone?

I’ve never spent time playing serious video games, but I enjoyed that silly casual game when it first came out for the iPhone and I kept playing new levels as they were released for several years. Until this weekend, I hadn’t launched the game for a long, long time, but I played it for a few minutes Saturday.

Playing the game made me feel nostalgic and it put me in the frame of mind of that time in my life — around 10 years ago — when I was still playing it. It reminded me warmly of playing Angry Birds and Train Yard with a girlfriend who loved me to bring my iPad to her apartment so she could play, too.

I smiled warmly until a thought suddenly wiped that smile off my face. Thinking about those games and that part of my life made me realize something I had never consciously realized. I used to do something to that girlfriend which annoyed her — just to tease her — and I can’t believe that was me.

I realized with horror Saturday that if I saw another man acting that way toward his girlfriend, I would now call him a jerk. I have trouble recognizing this small part of myself. Was that really me?

I don’t recall the details of what I did, but I remember her being annoyed. She never made an issue of it, but I know she didn’t like it. When she was playing Train Yard, there was some information which she sometimes needed online which she needed me to look up on a separate device from the one on which she was playing.

Sometimes there were hundreds of ways to solve a level, and the creator of the game had a site which showed every solution that he knew of for each level. He encouraged us to look at others’ solutions to different levels of the puzzle.

I would look up what she wanted to know and then tease her with it. When she was most eager to see the information, I might flash it to her for a moment and then pull it away, frustrating her because she couldn’t see it long enough to figure out the complex solution she needed.

She would become very frustrated. And I would laugh.

This was like a cruel game to me — and I have absolutely no understanding now of why I did it. It’s like a childish part of my personality that led me to act like a jerk in a small way — for my own amusement at my own expense.

I don’t even recognize that part of myself anymore — and I have trouble reconciling who I am now with that behavior which makes me feel ashamed of myself at this point.

The relationship with that woman was never serious. We dated for about a year. Both of us had just come out of serious relationships and just needed someone comfortable to spend time with. I’ll never see her again and she has no place in my life, but I wish I could go back and act differently, at least as it relates to this one childish behavior.

The current me wouldn’t like a lot of things about the old me. When I’m honest enough with myself to look at myself clearly at different points in my past, I can see ways in which I acted that reflected certain insecurities or bad old habits from earlier in life.

Every time I see something like this about myself — some big changes and some tiny changes — I realize that the growth hasn’t happened in one big moment of change. It’s been constant improvement and new self-understanding which have led me to quietly discard things which aren’t consistent with the mature person I want to be.

But I don’t hate the old me. In fact, I have a lot of empathy for him. Seeing these small old behaviors which are now dead in me reinforce my understanding of where much of this came from. It reminds me of the pain which I had internalized from long ago — which I didn’t even know was there — and which came out in small but unhealthy ways.

I know I’m not finished growing. I’m sure the day will come when I’m mature enough to look back at things about me now and feel embarrassed at what I was. But I think that’s just fine.

I have empathy for where I came from, and that gives me compassion for myself for things which I didn’t know to be embarrassed about in the past.

I appreciate what I am now. I know I’m still a work in progress. I know I can be maddeningly stubborn and ridiculous and even childish at times. I know I get hurt too easily. (I even understand why.) I appreciate how far I’ve come.

Mostly, I appreciate where I’m going. I am grateful that I’m not what I was when I was 25 or 35 or even 10 years ago. I’m grateful that something has pushed me to keep growing and changing. I’m grateful to know that I’m a little closer — each year — to becoming the best version of myself that I can be.

It was just a tiny bit of childish behavior. I doubt she even remembers it. I don’t know whether anybody else ever saw it. But it’s a part of me which is dead — and it has taken its place among many other childish and dysfunctional behaviors which have also died in me.

Life is about growth. If we ever get stagnant, we start to die. So I’m grateful for the ability to change and grow, even if it sometimes embarrasses me to realize childish things I’ve done.

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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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