I didn’t realize this until tonight, but I have been needing to cry

By David McElroy · January 3, 2021

A movie made me cry tonight.

It wasn’t the out-and-out sobbing sort. It was just the kind when tears well up in your eyes and your chest shudders a little. Mostly, it was the sort of experience that made my heart feel full, as though some sort of emotion inside was overflowing.

It’s not a great movie, but I enjoyed it. It’s certainly not a serious film. It just pushed my buttons in emotional ways. It made me feel things I’d been trying not to feel. And I realized afterward that I’ve been needing that. It felt like a release of pent-up feelings.

The movie is a 2005 romantic comedy called “Just Like Heaven.” Reese Witherspoon stars as a hyper-successful physician who doesn’t allow herself time for a personal life. After Elizabeth leaves her hospital — following a 26-hour shift — she has a traffic accident that leaves her in a coma. Close to death.

Mark Ruffalo plays a man named David who’s trying to get over the loss of his dead wife. He rents a furnished apartment on a month-to-month lease — and it turns out to be Elizabeth’s apartment while she’s in the coma. Before long, her spirit shows up at the apartment, but he’s the only one who can see her.

I won’t tell you the whole story, but the ending is pretty predictable for a romantic comedy.

I’d seen this movie before, but I don’t recall when. I’ve been desperately looking for something to watch lately that I could enjoy. I’ve been unhappy enough that I’d quit feeling enjoyment for anything. This isn’t a new thing for me. It’s happened fairly often over the last decade or so.

I found out years ago that there’s a word for this. In psychology, it’s called anhedonia. It’s the state of no longer feeling pleasure at things that would have given you pleasure before. It’s common for people going through some types of depression.

When it happens to me, I don’t realize it’s going on at first. For weeks now, I haven’t been able to enjoy anything. I’ve felt unable to concentrate on any creative work or anything to improve my world, and I couldn’t distract myself enough to stop ruminating.

I’ve tried watching movies and listening to music. I’ve read books and tried to write. I’ve done all sorts of things that would normally make me happy in some way, but I’ve just felt oddly annoyed with myself. I felt nothing. I’ve been pretty numb.

I saw this movie on a list of underrated romantic comedies and I recalled having seen it before. I watched a trailer and decided to give it a try again. I haven’t enjoyed anything else lately, but this was another way of trying to distract myself.

I don’t know why this movie pushed my buttons and touched my heart. Nothing about the specific plot has ever been true for me — and the idea of meeting the disembodied spirit of a dying woman certainly isn’t something I think is likely to happen to me. Or anyone else.

But I identified with these two people. The depressed David — convenient name for the character — was having trouble getting over the loss of a woman who was dead to him. That felt familiar to me. The focused and hardworking Elizabeth was losing her life — by cutting herself off from her feelings through her drive to succeed — and this reminded me of someone I used to know.

The two couldn’t touch one another. He was flesh and she was a spirit, but they — predictably — fell in love through the course of her nearly dying. It turns out — surprise, surprise — that they had been meant to meet. They didn’t fall in love based on sexual chemistry or simple physical attraction. Each fell in love with something more fundamental about the other.

There were various points during the movie when I felt like crying. It’s hard to recount the moments. It just felt like the experience of falling in love — in real life. And I’ve been without that for so long — without the feeling of being loved or of being able to say, “I love you,” to someone — that it hurt my heart.

But it hurt me in a good way. My heart overflowed. And for the first time in a long time — weeks? months? — I felt pleasure and happiness. It was happiness for a relationship that never really existed, of course, but my suspension of disbelief was good enough — in those moments — that it gave me pleasure.

And it brought those tears I mentioned.

Life isn’t the way it is in a movie. Lives aren’t saved in 90 minutes. Hearts don’t become unbroken so quickly. People don’t get over long-standing issues and allow themselves to live happily ever after.

But it’s cathartic to feel those emotions. It’s life-giving to put yourself into the position of someone who finds what you need in real life. It feels like redemption to see two people accept each other in love and to find your heart feeling a sense of, “What if…?”

The movie didn’t solve my problem. I don’t even know if I’ll feel any better tomorrow. But for now, I’m grateful for the fact that my heart overflowed — and that I could at least imagine once more being able to say, “I love you.”

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Six years ago this evening, a scared young dog came to live with me. She was so terrified on the ride to my house that she pooped in the back seat of the car. She had originally lived her life on a chain as a puppy. Then she lived among far too many other animals in a cramped apartment, where she was pushed around by bigger dogs. I was told she would always be a “special needs dog” and would probably never be much more than the scared girl she was then. But with a lot of love and patience, a very different dog emerged in the coming months. Now that she’s been with me for six years, it’s hard to imagine her any way other than she is today — as the World’s Happiest Dog®. One day, she’s going to tell her own story on her own podcast. You’ll subscribe when she gets started, won’t you? This loving girl deserves it.

It was obvious to me in the late 1990s that western society is heading toward social and economic collapse. When I told other people back then, most thought I was crazy, because they saw their society as stable and booming. But more and more people have slowly been coming to the same conclusion. And now, even the wealthy and powerful seem concerned. A new report from the World Economic Forum says the erosion of “social cohesion” is what we should fear right now. (Full report here.) Although I disagree with a lot of political spin that these elites put on the dangers ahead, I feel certain that we are headed toward social collapse. And most people will not prepare for it. The book that started me down the road of thinking about this came out in 1993. I thought its reasoning was impeccable, but that the time frame would be longer than the book expected. I still find that book a useful foundation for thinking about the issue — “The Great Reckoning,” by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg — even though its predictions are out of date. Dark days are coming. Smart people are going to have a plan to get out of the way of what’s coming. Will you?

Since I posted my audio discussion a couple of nights ago about some recent realizations I’ve had about myself, several people have asked for more about what I quoted from Jordan Peterson. The Canadian psychologist is controversial to some — and I don’t always agree with him — but I’ve found his lectures about art and its relation to psychological archetypes very useful. You can find him here talking about art being more about process than just result, which contains the material I quoted. Here’s another video from a lecture in which he discusses how artists mediate for the rest of society between the known and the unknown. And here’s another portion of a lecture at an art exhibition in which he talks about the necessity of artists for society. And if you missed my audio from two nights ago, here’s a link to my discussion about some things I’ve learned about myself and some things I need to change about myself as a result.

I just realized it was four years ago today when I came uncomfortably close to dying. I don’t remember how blunt I was publicly about this at the time, but the surgeon who operated on me made it clear afterward that I had been much worse than he had thought. My gallbladder was inflamed and I had been in tremendous pain, but what the doctors didn’t know until they started is that the organ was close to rupturing. Surgery that was supposed to take half an hour took two or three hours, because my gallbladder was so diseased — the surgeon’s word — was falling apart as he tried to remove it. I had gone to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital (the same one where I was born) and was kept for emergency surgery the next morning. I should have been home that night, but I had to stay in the hospital three days instead. The weird thing is that I never really believed I could have died. Maybe it was just denial, but I didn’t feel as though it was my time. I thought I still had a lot of life left to live. Four years later, I’m grateful to be alive, but I feel as though my life is still on pause. It’s been a blur. I still feel as though I’m waiting for “the rest of my life” to start.

Is “The Nightmare Before Christmas” really a Christmas movie or a Halloween movie? It’s both, making it a delightful mashup of themes and images from two very different holidays. Although Danny Elfman’s score was nominated for several different awards, Elfman wasn’t a typical composer for film scores. Up until he started working on films with Tim Burton, Elfman had been a rock-and-roll artist best known as the leader of the new wave band Oingo Boingo in the 1980s. Just this week, I heard an interview on the podcast Song Exploder on which Elfman explains how he came to write the music for the movie, including why he approached the music for the film very differently than he had approached writing rock music. I enjoyed the 20-minute interview and if you happen to love the film, this Christmas would be the perfect time to learn more about how the score came to be. Tap or click below to listen. Listen here.

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