‘This path leads to somewhere I think I can finally say, I’m home’

By David McElroy · October 27, 2019

I don’t know how to get home. I’m not sure I’ve ever been there.

I’m not from this place. Not really. Yes, I was born here. On this planet, in this state, not far from where I sit. But I look around and know with certainty these are not my people. I don’t really understand them and they don’t understand me. We might as well be from different planets.

I’ve been looking for home since I was a small child. We didn’t stay any place for very long. From the beginning, it was a painful blur.

Birmingham, Washington, Atlanta, Knoxville, Meridian, Anniston, Oak Grove, Pensacola, Jasper.

It was a long line of new places, new people, new situations. I had a mother, then I didn’t. I had stability, then I didn’t. I craved love and attention and approval, but being perfect was the only way I knew to pursue them. And I wasn’t perfect.

I’ve longed for something all my life. I didn’t know what to call it. I’ve longed to find my home.

Every now and then, I still think of a song that a woman wrote 10 years ago which she said was inspired by her feelings about me. I’ve had it on my mind today, because it’s about the idea of home.

She was half of a duo which had been professionally singing in her area for years. She wrote and recorded this song as a simple demo. I have no idea whether she ever fully developed it and performed it, because the group broke up shortly thereafter when she moved to England for graduate school.

I had known her years before this, but we hadn’t pursued a relationship at the time. We were too far away from one another. I’m not sure why else. But in 2009, she got back in touch with me to see whether I was still interested — and we started talking all the time.

But the timing was terrible. I was in the middle of grieving about another relationship which had just ended. My heart was still somewhere else, so I wasn’t willing to let anything serious develop with her.

When she wrote to tell me about the song she had written, she told me why I had inspired the song. She said she hadn’t made the lyrics obvious enough for anyone else to know what they were about, but she said they were about me.

“David, I miss you,” she wrote that day. “Since we’ve been speaking again this past half year, you’re always on my mind. I dream about you, think about you and fantasize about you — or about ‘us,’ I guess. I’m not saying that that is good or bad. I’m only telling you what goes on in my private world.”

And then she sent the demo of the song.

The chorus is what I’ve kept coming back to in the 10 years since — and I’ve come to understand it more deeply as the years go by.

I’m sick of running
I’m sick of losing my way
This path leads to somewhere
I think I can finally say
I’m home, I’m home, I’m home

Nothing came of that relationship. The reasons don’t matter. I haven’t spoken with her for close to 10 years. We’ve gone completely different directions.

But I understand now why she made the connection in the lyrics between home and me, even though nothing about me had been literal home to her. I understand why the lyrics were about longing to see me — and then me meeting her at a station. But mostly, I understand why she equated all of that with finally being home — after years of running and losing her way.

Home isn’t a place. Home is someone who truly loves you.

And that’s why I’m still longing for the home I’ve always needed.

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It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

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.

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