When we feel we’ve lost control, our behavior stops making sense

By David McElroy · September 19, 2020

I didn’t get to sleep Friday night until the sun was coming up Saturday morning around 6:30 a.m.

I’m not quite sure what I was doing all night, but this has become a pattern for me lately. I spent some of the time reading. I watched a movie. And I spent quite awhile at this little gazebo about half a mile from my house. It’s at the center of the little downtown area of the suburb where I live. While the rest of the city is asleep, it’s a good place for me to write.

I’m back there again Saturday night, but it’s hard to be sure why I’m here. I feel the need to write, but I also feel a creeping frustration that doesn’t have a name. Part of me wants to hide and be alone, and another part of me wants to desperately reach out to someone. I feel so conflicted — like someone who is screaming like a mad man on the inside but looks perfectly calm on the outside.

I feel as though I’ve lost control over my life — and these late-night times of solitude seem to be the only times when things make any sense.

I hadn’t really drawn a conscious connection between this late-night habit and my feeling of lost of control, but a friend sent me a link to something last weekend that left me thinking about it.

In June, journalist Daphne K. Lee tweeted from Taiwan that she had just learned an interesting phrase that she can relate to. In Chinese, it’s “報復性熬夜,” which she said translates roughly as “revenge bedtime procrastination.”

Lee said the concept is “a phenomenon in which people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours.”

The more I thought about that this week, the more I’ve seen the ways in which this might apply to me. I’m not happy about it, but it seems to accurately describe what I’ve been unconsciously doing.

Ever since I stopped working in politics, I’ve slowly lost the tight grip I used to have over the direction of my life. I can’t point to one specific day and tell you that’s when it started, but there have been markers as it’s gotten worse over the decade. I started at a point at which I felt on top of the world. I was successful and prosperous. I was loved. (My biggest relationship issue was choosing between two women.) I felt that I was in complete control.

But everything came crashing down for me — in what felt like a horrific, slow-motion train wreck that left me feeling powerless and alone, down in a dark and depressing pit of shame.

As I sit here in the pleasant 66-degree Saturday evening all alone, I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say. I suppose I’m trying to find a narrative that makes sense to me. I want to find some way to look at myself and feel as though I can still recognize who I’ve always thought I was. And there’s a part of me that feels very ashamed of not being the successful and in-control person that I used to be.

I guess I want to find a narrative that explains — to you, as well as to myself — what I’ve done. I want to feel proud of myself again. And I want to feel as though I can still be a man who someone else can be proud of, but I don’t feel that way when I’m trapped in this web of shame and self-condemnation.

I miss being a man who saw what he wanted and then moved to get it. I miss having the confidence to know — or at least to believe I knew — that I would somehow always find a way to win. I remember being a man who did outlandish things and somehow won.

That felt like the real me. What I’ve become feels like the real me is trapped under layers of shame. I don’t know how to dig my way back to being myself.

I have to find a way to regain control — over my thoughts, my actions, my life. I know that I need help and love and support from a partner, but even if I find that, the ultimate spark will come from some buried part of me who still knows how to take outrageous risks and still knows how to win.

There’s a strange beauty to the quiet stillness as I sit alone outside tonight. There’s a comfort in being alone in this crisp night air. But the day is coming when my days will once again be filled with work I love — and time spent with people I love — and I’ll once again fall contentedly to sleep at night with a smile on my face.

That day will come when I’ve regained control over creating a life which makes me happy. And a life which makes others happy, too.

But for now, I sit in this beautiful stillness and ponder how to get there.

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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.

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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?

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