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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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.

Narcissists tend to turn their children into narcissists — and since a narcissist doesn’t realize he or she is a narcissist, there’s no bad intent. How does this happen? I watched a YouTube video over the weekend from an Australian psychologist who does a nice job of summarizing how it works. None of this is new to me, but I thought it was useful for those who haven’t spent years digging through books and articles about it. The same psychologist has an excellent summary of something which confuses a lot of people about narcissism. You’ve all seen examples of the loud, boisterous and overbearing narcissist, but what about the ones who are more introverted and vulnerable? This type is called a covert narcissist (or a vulnerable narcissist), and this is what my father was. In the first video, I strongly see myself in the ways my father treated me and in the second video, I see what my father was almost successful in making me become.

It’s National Dog Day in the U.S. and Lucy is here to remind you to go express love and appreciation to your favorite canine. Not only does your doggie friend give you love and affection, but he or she also protects your home from intruders — such as birds, squirrels, mail carriers and other undesirables who deserve to be barked at vigorously. Where would we be without that? And if you think this service is actually unnecessary, ask yourself how long it’s been since your home was the victim of a vicious squirrel attack. See? The doggie defense works. Keep barking at ’em, Lucy.

I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time over the last couple of years thinking and writing about love and connection. I’ve come to understand that this lack of love and connection is at the root of a lot of human tragedy and unhappiness, including addictions and depression. As I talked with others and researched the psychology behind the issues, I ran into the surprising fact that researchers are increasingly using psychedelic drugs to allow volunteers to have experiences which are giving them a sense of connection which they’ve lost — something that allows them to feel connected to love and God in a way they didn’t understand before — which is having dramatic effects in combating things such as depression and addictions. In this 15-minute TED talk — without an audience in the age of COVID-19 — Johns Hopkins researcher Mary Cosimano shares her experiences with guided psilocybin sessions being used to treat addiction, depression and end-of-life issues. One of her key observations is the importance of love and connection. She said that it seems love is literally part of the answer. In her role as director of guide/facilitator services for the program, Cosimano is responsible for training and supervising session facilitators.

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