Deconstructing my old life’s hard, but I’m learning to be healthier

By David McElroy · September 13, 2020

I’ve spent most of my life learning to let go of the things I thought were important.

My father almost turned me into a narcissist. Just like him. I didn’t know that, of course. He didn’t know that, either. I didn’t understand he was a narcissist, because I didn’t even know what clinical narcissism was. It never would have occurred to me, because my father — the god-like central figure of my childhood — was my standard for all that was right and normal.

I’ve spent my adult life on a long journey of recovery. It started while I was still in my late 20s when I vaguely realized something was wrong. That led to the realization that I had come from a very dysfunctional family. But I still had so many layers of dysfunction to take apart — and I had so much to learn in order to become an emotionally healthy adult.

Even now, I keep finding more habits to unlearn. I keep realizing that I have beliefs that need to change. But as I take apart the old pieces of ugly dysfunction — brick by brick — I slowly replace them with something better.

I’m slowly becoming an emotionally healthy man.

I never wanted to admit to myself just how dysfunctional I was when I was younger. Maybe that would have been too scary for my psyche at the time. Maybe I needed to tell myself that I just had a few minor things to fix — simply because it would have been too intimidating to see how much I had to change. It would have been too humiliating to realize that someone so close to “perfect” was so fatally flawed.

When you’re emotionally unhealthy, you redefine negative things about yourself to make them into positive traits. I did that and I never knew what I was doing.

I wasn’t grandiose. I was just ambitious and talented.

I wasn’t thin-skinned and overly sensitive. The people around me were merely rude and didn’t understand me. It was their fault.

I wasn’t arrogant when I routinely broke other people’s rules, such as the orders of work superiors. Other people were simply controlling and their rules were constricting. Every boss I had was the stupidest person on Earth, so I was right to ignore his orders.

I wasn’t a perfectionist. I just had really high standards.

I didn’t have an excessive need for praise and attention. I was simply a star who deserved validation and other people were idiots for not appreciating my greatness.

I didn’t say those things, of course, not even to myself. But just underneath the surface, that’s the way I felt. I found ways to take every one of my questionable habits and beliefs — and turn them into evidence that the world was wrong and that I was superior.

It’s been a long and winding road to understand all of these inner deceptions. I’ve slowly tried to see myself and reality in honest ways. That’s meant accepting that I was more like my father — in dangerous ways — than I could have accepted at the time.

I’ve had to give up some things that I thought were core parts of who I was. I’ve had to give up grandiose ideas about myself. I had to give up the fantasy that I was going to save the world. I had to give up the notion that everyone was going to love me and praise me. I had to give up my core belief that I was special — that I was secretly better than everybody else.

I’m slowly replacing all of that ugliness with things that reflect who I really am — for both good and bad. Healing means that I am slowly learning how to be normal.

I wish I could have grown up with healthy mental habits and healthy inner beliefs about myself. I wish I could have been emotionally healthier when I was trying to build a company. I wish I could have seen the truth about myself and about the world in time to give myself more time to build on what I’ve learned.

But I didn’t know those things as a child. I didn’t know them when I was 30. I didn’t even know them 10 years ago. But I know now.

All I can do is to live my life in a normal and healthy way — and pray I’m lucky enough to make up for lost time by building the life I wish I had created long ago.

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