Smallest ray of hope can make us feel a change we need is coming

By David McElroy · July 14, 2019

The physical space around me is almost always a reflection of how happy I am.

When I’m unhappy and feeling lost, my house becomes a wreck. I don’t clean much. I don’t pick up after myself. Before long, it looks as though I live in a place where there’s been a tornado.

When I’m happy and feeling loved, my habits are entirely different. I’ll happily keep things fairly neat and clean, at least by my standards. When my heart is happy, I keep things looking decent, which satisfies my mind’s need for order — and that reinforces my happiness.

I haven’t been cleaning the house much lately, so it’s been a mess.

But for the past few hours, I’ve been cleaning. I’ve been sweeping and vacuuming and filling bags of trash. (Lucy and the cats still hate the vacuum cleaner.) Late Saturday night, I looked around and realized it was time for change, so I launched into a cleaning spree that might take all night.

Why? The only explanation is that I suddenly had a vision of something powerful — something that I need — which suddenly seemed real and possible.

As Lucy and I walked late Saturday, I was listening to an audiobook in which a doctor was explaining how the human body “rewires” itself to recover from the negative programming that a brain has received from trauma, especially childhood trauma of one type or another.

I recently mentioned psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk and his book, “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma,” when I wrote about my extreme reactions to conflict and how I can feel panic during conflict which makes me feel like a child under attack again. Much of Van der Kolk’s research seems applicable to my experience with my father.

Later in the book, he talks about the things which can reverse the process of what was done to us — to actually find ways to heal the damage we experienced. But before he talked about specific methods, he said the single most important asset we have when it comes to repairing trauma is in the relationships with those who love us.

Van der Kolk talked about the touch of someone who loves us and hearing the voice of this person. He talked about feeling secure and loved in a relationship of trust — and he talked about the role of a community of people who we trust.

As I listened, the specific words suddenly melted away. I had to turn off the recording. As I continued walking down the quiet streets, I felt the warm glow of love and community. It wasn’t a rational feeling. It wasn’t a specific plan for how to get something. It was just a full-blown image of what this looked like.

For that moment, I felt like a changed man. It felt like a spiritual conversion, but it was nothing more than the powerful feeling that I had the actual presence of someone who loved me and that I had a community of people where I belonged.

This might sound odd — since nothing really changed — but maybe this glimpse was enough to give me hope. And maybe it’s because it seems so real because I’ve experienced this before.

I’ve talked with you before about my continuing struggle to eat as I should and to control my weight. I keep trying to fix this problem, but I keep “falling off the wagon.” There’s only one circumstance under which this is never a problem.

When I love someone — and she loves me — I no longer feel compelled to try to fill a need with food. Over the last few years, I’ve had numerous times when I started down the right path. Several times, I’ve started shedding unwanted weight and then given up again, because I’ve fallen back into the trap of eating for the emotional need.

It was years ago that I last went through a period when I was dropping pounds without any real effort. I was in love — and I felt loved in return. I was excited about a future with her. Everything about life felt different. It wasn’t that I had more self-discipline. No, it was simply that I didn’t need any discipline — because I didn’t have a need that I was trying to fill in an unhealthy way.

So when Bessel van der Kolk talked about how such a loving relationship changes everything and provides the foundation for the rest of recovery, I immediately knew what he was talking about. What’s more, I already had a full-color, three-dimensional version of that reality imprinted on my heart.

After I stopped listening to the book and finished my walk, I felt a glow of being loved. It wasn’t a conscious decision to feel that way. This warm state of being just took over my mind for a few minutes — and the world seemed like a different place.

Was it just hope? Was it delusion? Was it self-deception? I don’t know what to call it. I don’t actually have that love in my life which I experienced for those few minutes. I haven’t talked with her for a long time. I’ve believed for all this time that she still loves me. I still love her, too, despite my best efforts to move on. It’s complicated.

When I got back home from the walk, I was still feeling loved and peaceful inside. And the disorder inside my house no longer felt acceptable or normal. That was about four hours ago — and I’ve been cleaning ever since.

I don’t know how I’ll feel tomorrow or Monday or next week. I know that nothing has really changed. I know it was just a powerful vision of “what could be” that’s fueled this so far, so who knows how far that could go.

Molly and the other cats are a bit annoyed that they were locked out of the office for awhile. I cleaned the office and then sprayed bug killer — part of the continuing effort to fight fleas — that needed to dry before they could go back to the room where they prefer to sleep.

Molly has been in the bedroom with me while I write this, making sure I know she’s annoyed that she can’t get to her sleeping spot — and she’s being pretty dramatic with her demonstration of looking exhausted.

So I’ll end this and get back to work. The bug spray is dry by now, so they can have the office back. And I have a lot more cleaning to get finished before sunrise.

I just wish I could wake up Sunday and discover that my beautiful vision of love and security is reality. That would be cause for some powerful change.

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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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