When I’ve done something great, nothing seems impossible to me

By David McElroy · June 10, 2020

Do you know what it feels like to be certain that nothing can stop you?

It’s a moment of winning. Time slows down. It’s the sudden feeling that all is right with your world. It’s the certainty that you could do anything in that instant. That nothing could stop you. That you are in such a state of perfect harmony with something in the universe that God is pleased with you.

I live for those moments. I crave those experiences just as much as a junkie needs a hit of his drug. In those rare moments of seeming perfection, I feel as though I am good enough — and that I can do anything.

I felt that way one Saturday morning 15 years ago. I was at a film festival and my short film was about to be shown to an audience for the very first time. It was a large crowd, maybe 500 or so, I suppose. I was nervous. The audience had seemed bored during the films before it. Maybe this was a tough crowd.

And then my film started.

After a minute or so of build up, we got to the first joke. The audience laughed. Over the next 10 minutes, the audience roared with laughter at all the right parts. They clapped at parts. And when it was over, the applause was more than just polite. They loved it.

I felt as though I was about 50 feet tall. I felt unstoppable. I felt perfect.

I knew I had made a film that was as good as I was capable of at the time. I had hoped the audience would enjoy it enough and would forgive the flaws of a first-time director on a limited budget. Yet the reaction was far better than anything I had hoped for.

And I was on an emotional high that I can’t put into words.

I felt the same thing when I launched a brand new newspaper when I was 27 or 28 years old. After months of preparation and struggle, I stood at the end of a massive printing press checking copies of that first edition. Almost every small newspaper in the market looked boring and vaguely amateur. Mine looked and read like a metro daily, at least close enough for me.

I knew I had hit a home run. It was a win. And in the next couple of days, everybody who saw it raved about it and seemed stunned at what I’d done. It was another emotional high.

I could tell you dozens of tiny stories that are similar. Every one of them would be meaningful and emotional to me, but I won’t belabor the point.

They’re emotional snapshots of winning in my mind. They’re the highs of things I’ve done that I knew were good. They were things that made me feel great. Some of them were at newspapers. Some were experiences of winning on election nights when I had helped a nobody pull off a stunning and unexpected political win.

Some of them are smaller. They can come to me in any moment when I know I’ve done something — or I’m in the middle of doing something — that feels as though everything has come together. That I’m doing some small great thing, even though that sounds like a contradiction.

I experienced it a couple of nights ago as I edited a photo. It wasn’t even an important photo that a lot of people were going to see. But everything about it was perfect. I had seen something amazing in my mind’s eye when I aimed the camera. And then I carefully edited the photo, first in Lightroom and then in Photoshop, to achieve the look I wanted.

Nobody else would care. Nobody else will ever know. But in that moment, the work I did felt completely right. I felt as though I was great, because I had done something that felt so right.

I can have this experience in a romantic relationship. In a moment when I do something for a woman — someone who I love dearly — that I know means something to her, I experience that state. When I simply do something to make a woman happy when I love her, that puts me into that experience of feeling an emotional high.

I’ve always thought I would feel the same way at the birth of a child. I’ve thought I would feel that as I helped lovingly guide that child through the experiences of life and as that child starts experiencing his or her own wins. I can’t imagine feeling anything less than that high under those circumstances.

What I’m talking about is an internal feeling of rightness that says I’ve done the absolutely correct thing. It’s a knowing on a gut level. It’s a very good thing. Maybe even a great thing. It’s an inner certainty, like a spiritual awareness rising in me. It’s like worship.

Some people live for the pursuit of money or material things. Some people live for collecting trophies. I live for the pursuit of these emotional and spiritual highs.

I don’t get those from living a mundane life. I only get them — at least the big ones — from pursuing big things.

I think this is why I love winners and competent people and satisfying emotional relationships. They all make me feel great. They all make me feel as though I’m reaching for something — and connecting with something — far greater than me.

And I desperately crave this feeling right now.

Share on Social Networks

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?

Related Posts