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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I received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine Monday — and I’m happy to report that I’m neither dead nor a zombie controlled by Bill Gates and Co. Eligibility was recently opened in Alabama to everyone who’s 16 or older, so I signed up for the Pfizer vaccine at a site run by a local university. I know this is a political issue for a lot of people, but that honestly baffles me. We can disagree about whether such a vaccine should be mandatory — which I’m against — but as a voluntary choice, it seems like an easy choice now that it’s been safely given to millions of people. Is it a perfect preventative? Of course not. But the decision seemed obvious to me when looking at the statistics and evidence. I haven’t had any of the side effects that some people have experienced, but that’s supposed to be more of an issue after the second dose, which I’ll get on May 3. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if I grow a third arm — or if the secret microchip kicks in and someone starts trying to control me remotely. All kidding aside, getting the vaccine seems like a rational voluntary choice to me.

I get a lot of email from readers. Some of it is fascinating and useful. Some of it is full of confessions that people want to share with a stranger. Some people write to ask advice. What’s really surprising, though, is the small percentage that seems to come from mentally unbalanced people. When I started using the metaphor about being an alien — the tagline at the top of each page here — it never occurred to me that I’d start hearing from people who took it seriously. But every few months, I get a strange email — such as the one above from a few months back — from someone who seems to think I’m claiming to be an actual alien. The first time it happened, I laughed. By the time it became a semi-regular thing, I was simply appalled. For the record, I can provide no proof that I’m an alien, because … well … it’s just a metaphor. I do feel like an alien among human beings, but as far as I know, I’m just as earthbound as you are. It’s just a metaphor. Honest. Or at least, that’s what my lizard-beast overlords told me to say.

After Tampa Bay, Fla., musician Colt Clark had all of his gigs canceled last year for months on end, the entire family felt trapped at home as most of the world was on quarantine lockdown. His wife, Aubree, had an idea that would let Colt make music and involve the whole family in making music videos to share with their friends and family on Facebook. Aubree is a photographer and homeschooling mom to a daughter and two sons, who range in age from 6 to 11. After their friends started asking to share the videos, they made the performances public — and a few of them are now on YouTube, where they go by the name of Colt Clark and the Quarantine Kids. The younger son, Becket, is on drums. The older boy, Cash, plays keyboards, strings and guitars. Dad supplies lead vocals and plays guitar, while 6-year-old Bellamy mostly dances but sometimes does backup vocals. There’s even a dog who makes an occasional appearance. The Clark family has just raised the bar for what I need to create with my future children. And best of all, they seem to be having a great time together. I hope they make you as happy as they make me.

Have you ever wondered how the social media world works for so-called “influencers”? I find it comical, so I thought I’d share with you. I frequently get offers such as what I’m about to describe. And if I’m getting such offers — as a relative nobody in the online world — you can only imagine what people with huge audiences are offered. It starts with an email appealing to my ego: “We came across your online presence and we LOVE your style. We’d love to have you as one of our Brand Ambassadors. To celebrate our new [Brand Name] collection, we want to give you a FREE Watch so you can post a picture of you wearing it and drive more exposure to our brand.” Did you hear that? They love me. They want me to be seen wearing their cheap $59 watch so other people will think, “If this amazing influencer wears that, surely I should buy one.” They even offer me commissions on the watches sold from people clicking from my site. So the next time you see some alleged “influencer” touting something online or on social media, remember that this is what it’s probably all about. It’s laughable.

Modern culture is going insane. The latest evidence comes from the effort to redefine children’s author Dr. Seuss as a racist whose books should be banned. Why? Because a few images in those books don’t meet modern political standards. The drawing you see here is one of those “dangerously racist images,” and it comes from the Dr. Seuss classic, “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street.” The book catalogs all the wild diversity seen by a child on one street, including the offending drawing of a Chinese boy. What’s racist about it? Apparently, it was racist to show the boy eating rice, wearing a funny hat, using chopsticks and (worst of all) having eyes represented by a slit. (The bearded man near him has dots for eyes, but that’s apparently OK.) In other words, the stereotypes are considered racist today. (Oddly, the culture warriors who fret over such things are never concerned if a white southerner is depicted as ignorant trash living in a trailer. Some stereotypes are great, especially if the left hates those people anyway.) Theodore Geisel — the name of the real-life Dr. Seuss — was a product of his time and nobody at that time would have seen any of this as racist. Using stereotypes and exaggerations is how artists depict differences in simple ways. You can argue that it’s better to achieve the end result in a different way, but it’s insane to pretend that everybody from the past should have his work erased because it doesn’t match the preferences of modern leftists. Unfortunately, the company that publishes Dr. Seuss books has caved to the insane people — and six of his popular works will no longer be published. The world has simply gone insane.

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