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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It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

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