Inner alarm is louder every day; big changes must come to my life

By David McElroy · July 18, 2019

It happened again today. I was at the office trying to work when the panicked voice started screaming inside.

“I’ve got to get out of here — right now!”

There was nothing unsafe around me. Nothing suddenly changed. But the inner voice that knows me and tells me the truth was in full panic mode.

This has been happening off and on for a couple of years, but because the conscious, rational part of me hasn’t yet listened and obeyed, something inside me is yelling louder. It’s more urgent. It’s sounding an alarm more frequently.

A few weeks ago, I sent a friend an email to explain what’s going on inside about this. I told him that something in me was so insistent on major change that I was concerned — well, half concerned, half hopeful — that I was about to just say, “I quit,” and walk away from life as I know it right now.

I have all sorts of metaphors for what this is about.

I’ve told you before about feeling like a hexagonal peg in a world where the square pegs and the round pegs war against each other. I’ve told you about feeling as though I want to become a hermit for awhile. And I’ve told you that I feel like an alien among humans.

None of those is completely true, but in a lot of ways, it’s all these things and more.

Do you know what it feels like to have a persistent and gnawing feeling that you’re in the wrong place — and that you’re not doing what you need to be doing? I’ve known those feelings for much of my life. Every time those feelings have gotten too strong, it’s been a sure sign that I was out of place — like a fish who had somehow forgotten that he needs water in order to live.

One of my favorite literary illusions from the King James translation of the Bible is the one that says that we now see “through a glass, darkly.” To understand it, you have to remember it’s talking about a mirror and that mirrors of the past weren’t made to modern standards. They could be warped and uneven in ways that distorted the image.

When I see where I need to be and what I need to do, it’s as though I’m looking into one of those ancient mirrors. I’m seeing an image, but it’s a strain to know what’s accurate and what’s being warped by imperfections in the lens. Even the things which I think I know can be clouded and warped.

But there’s one thing which I’ve known for many years — and it’s an insight which my ex-wife had about me. She said that most people are lucky, because they can say that they are writers or accountants or teachers or carpenters or whatever. They can define themselves in terms of some service that other people know they need.

But she told me I’m not like that. She told me that my real “product” is myself. Whatever I provide to the world — whatever people pay me for — is for something which they don’t even know they need until they see whatever that is that they want from me.

She explained it in terms of celebrities who are paid a lot of money just because of who they are. Do people go to see a movie starring Tom Hanks or Samuel L. Jackson or Scarlett Johansson because those are the best actors available today? No. They go to those movies because they like something about those actors. Those people are paid because they have a personal following — because people love something in them — not because they are the best actors in the world.

She said that whatever things I do, people will pay me because it’s me — not because I’m providing a service they could get from anyone else.

In my heart, I’ve always know that she was right. But for most of the years since then, I have ended up providing fairly generic services which could have been done by anybody — and I’m doing exactly the same thing again when I provide real estate services which any other competent professional could do just as well.

Change is coming for me. I don’t know exactly what’s going to trigger it. Maybe I’ll go crazy and quit one day. Maybe I’ll make everybody mad and get myself fired. Who knows?

But when the first brick falls, all of the other ones will start falling as well. Once the change starts happening — what I’m doing, where I live, who I spend time with, who I love, who I count on, what change I pursue in the world — the rest are going to start changing as well.

The inner alarms are going off more and more frequently. I hope I’m able to be wise enough to make nice, orderly changes. Those are more pleasant. They’re less scary.

But I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that change is coming. If I don’t let it happen the easy way, something inside me is going to force me to do it the hard way.

Once the change starts — probably without warning — there’s no looking back.

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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?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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