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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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We’re neither friends nor enemies, just strangers who share the past

By David McElroy · November 3, 2019

The man walked into something like a cave and saw stalactites hanging from the roof. But these weren’t normal mineral formations. Each one contained the face and memories of someone important from his past.

I heard the man’s story this week in a book about experimental drug-assisted psychotherapy. During the experience, his unconscious was creating symbols for things it was pushing into his consciousness. And the man could have conversations with these people from the past, in a way that felt completely real to him.

I found this story oddly frightening. I imagined what it would feel like to encounter such people from my past. It gave me shivers, but it’s hard to explain why. All I can say is that when I close the door on someone from the past, I prefer not to re-open the door to something dead. I’d rather allow the memories to stand on their own.

And I’ve lived something of a waking nightmare for the past couple of days — as I’ve vividly experienced conversations with women who have been dead to me.

I don’t remain friends with someone who I had once loved. For me, that’s just not the way love works. If I could have an intimate relationship with a woman and then back off to “just friends,” it would only mean that I hadn’t really loved her.

If I am in love with you, I will pursue you in every reasonable way I know how. If we don’t end up together, though, I will eventually close the door — quite firmly. I’m not going to be your friend.

Because of this, every past love is like a mental box that’s been closed and stored away. If I get to the point that I can do that, it means I’ve gotten over the feelings of love and I’ve come to terms with whatever happened between us, for good or bad.

By that point, we’re not friends. We’re not enemies. We’re just strangers who have some shared memories.

I’ve successfully done that with every past love so far, except one. (That’s one which obviously needs to be put away for good, too, but I haven’t been able to seal the lid on it. Not yet.)

For the last few days, those boxes have come off the shelf — one at a time — and I’ve had emotionally difficult inner conversations. Strangely, they’ve left me wishing that I could really do such a thing — have a series of last conversations to say things that should have been said, some things which I understood then and others that I’ve come to understand since.

The least emotional conversation was with Gail. She was my first love. She meant the world to me for about a year and a half. But things started going off the rails. I understand now that I was growing in ways that led me away from her, but I was scared to break up with her. The truth — which I didn’t understand at the time — is that I feared nobody else would ever love me.

In our imagined conversation, I apologized to Gail for not having had the courage to end the relationship when it was clear that I needed to. I let things drag on for more than a year after it should have ended, forcing her to end something which I should have done for myself.

I don’t even know now who she is. I barely remember who she was. And nothing about me today even vaguely resembles the person I was at 21.

The shortest of these conversations was with Shelly. I told her that I was angry about how she had handled a lot of things. I told her that I understood she was hurt and confused by her previous abusive relationship, but that her fears didn’t excuse the way she pulled me close and then closed the door without explanation or apology.

I told Gina that I sometimes miss her. I don’t regret that we went our separate ways. She and I both handled some things about the end poorly, but I genuinely liked her. She was enjoyable to spend time with. I don’t regret that we went different ways — or that she eventually married someone else — but that doesn’t stop me from missing the enjoyable times that we had together.

The longest conversation was with Lydia and that would have been true — I suspect — if these had been real-life conversations. She’s brilliant and complicated and mercurial. My fears about her led me to pull away from her in a way that hurt her. Her eventual reaction to that was dishonest and led her to hurt me. We were two flawed people trying to navigate difficult emotional waters and we didn’t handle it well.

But Lydia and I could talk until we were both too exhausted to stay awake and never come close to exhausting the things we were curious about and cared deeply about. Her brilliance, curiosity and insight made her a perfect discussion partner for me. We could talk about anything — intellectual, emotional, psychological, theological, whatever — and we would both come out of the conversation smarter for what we had experienced together.

We won’t have those conversations again. I don’t think they would be wise for either of us. I miss the exhilaration of loving her, but I don’t miss the damage that it did to me inside. I apologized to her for my part in the pain between us — and I wished her well.

I asked Anjhela why we never allowed ourselves to turn an intensely emotional connection into a real relationship. In this conversation, she said it was because each one of us was scared of the other. Neither of us had experienced something this emotionally intense and each one of us had enough baggage — fears about not being loved — that we were afraid to trust in something which felt that powerful. Even though my own unconscious guided those words, I suspect it’s exactly what she would say if we were to talk. And I think she’s right.

There were a few others, but there’s no reason to detail them all. I feel emotionally exhausted by all those imagined conversations, but I also feel that they were worthwhile. In some cases, I have more of a sense of closure than I had — something which I’ll never really have in real life.

In the metaphor that my unconscious created, these women and the memories about them weren’t stalactites. There was a locked compartment in the side of a vast wall that reminded me of a vault. I’m the only one with a key to that vault. Inside the vault were shelves with boxes — one for each of these women.

As this process happened, I would pull a box out and place it on a long metal table. Then I’d close the vault door and open the box. Opening the lid was like opening Pandora’s box — each one containing all the memories about that particular woman.

There was one other box in the room. Even as I dealt with each of the loves from the past, that one emotionally loomed over everything else. I didn’t open that box. I didn’t even touch it. I wanted to open it, but I wasn’t ready to let it go. Not yet.

I locked all the other boxes in the vault. I left the remaining one sitting on another table. As I got to the door of the room, I looked back at that one box.

“I still love you,” I said. “I shouldn’t love you, but I still do.”

And then I turned the light off and closed the door.

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Briefly

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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