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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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Learning to be an emotional man helped me to overcome numb past

By David McElroy · March 20, 2021

In high school, I hated pep rallies — but I wasn’t sure why.

I just knew I felt uncomfortable when the band was playing and everybody was excited and cheering. I felt oddly out of place. I never told anybody this, but I felt embarrassed of myself. I didn’t clap or cheer or whatever else the crowd around me was doing.

I felt horribly conflicted, although I didn’t understand that at the time. Part of me was excited by the music and cheering and chanting — but I was afraid to let myself go. I was afraid to feel anything. And that made these public displays of emotional frenzy seem very dangerous to me.

I felt coldly numb as I grew up. In middle school, some kids laughingly called me “Spockelroy,” which was someone’s clever mixture of “Spock” and “McElroy.” I was the brilliant rationalist who didn’t feel anything — and who never expressed emotions.

I understand why now.

The loss of my mother had hurt me more than I understood. My fear of my father’s unpredictable narcissistic rage was constant. I had learned that I got into trouble if I expressed my unhappiness.

I learned to remain numb. Not to feel. It was how I survived.

The photo above is from my high school senior yearbook. It’s a greatly enlarged portion of a full-page photo at the beginning of the football section of the book. At some important and happy moment of a football game, the photographer snapped a photo of the crowd. And over on the side of the page — there’s this tiny image of me cheering. That’s me in the middle and my best friend, Larry, is on the left.

Even though I was just a tiny part of that photo, I was mortified by it when it came out. I hated it.

I actually think I know the night it was taken. My Walker Vikings were in the semi-finals of the state football playoffs on our home field against the Decatur Red Raiders. The thrilling game went to double-overtime — and we won on the last play. I suspect this was from that victory.

I really was excited. I was happy. I cared a lot about us winning, so I was really emotionally invested. But even with something as common and understandable as my high school winning a big game, I was ashamed and uncomfortable afterward to realize that I had been so openly emotional.

I didn’t understand any of that at the time, of course. I just knew that anything about my emotions — or public demonstrations of emotions — made me horribly uncomfortable.

When I was a young newspaper editor, it made me very good at my job. Shortly before my 22nd birthday, I became the youngest managing editor of a daily newspaper in the country at the time. Everybody in that newsroom was older than I was. Many resented me getting the job, but I was in charge simply because I could set all emotions and stress aside — and get the job done, no matter what was going on.

Running a newsroom was stressful and a lot of people couldn’t emotionally handle it. At a small daily, you were the focal point through which all news stories, photos and page design went. You made assignments. You edited copy. You decided which stories went where. You designed the pages, wrote the headlines, selected and sized the photos, and even supervised the people who physically constructed the pages. You did all of that while more than a dozen people were shouting questions and shoveling information at you.

In that environment, I thrived. I was completely calm. I felt nothing. I just got the job done — and that’s why I was never late getting an edition off the floor to production. Not even once.

But I didn’t always connect well with people back then. I didn’t experience music and film and other art the way most people do. I had no idea why, but my numbness made it difficult for me to feel normal.

I’d like to tell you that I know exactly when that changed, but I don’t. All I really seem to know is that the more psychologically healthy I got over the years, the less numb I felt. My emotions were raw for a long time, because I slowly experienced all sorts of hurt from the past that I had buried in shame. But I also experienced amazing things that I’d never felt before.

Today, I am an emotional man.

I can tear up easily at movies, but I still hope nobody notices. Songs can hit me so hard that I cry softly. And when I experience beauty and the joys of nature, I can feel powerful stabs in my heart — feelings of painful happiness — that would have been foreign to me as a child or as a young man.

I understand now that feeling emotions and sharing them are central to the human experience. Sure, emotions can get in the way at times. They can make us say and do things we’ll regret later. But they can also lead us to express things that are beautiful and loving and transcendent to the people in our lives.

I never understood how to really love someone else — or how to let someone else love me — until I dropped the mask of numbness and learned to be vulnerable with my feelings. It’s a tradeoff.

There are a lot of men in our culture (and certainly some women, too) who never learn to get in touch with their feelings. They suffer and the people around them suffer, but those who are stifling their emotions are no more aware of their numbness than I was as a young man.

And having lived that way for so long, I can say they’re missing out on one of the most joyful parts of the human life.

I love my brain and my reason, because they can be amazing tools to accomplish some of what I want in life. But I love my heart and my emotions even more — because they seem to be the core of what brings meaning to my life.

Getting past the numbness — getting in touch with my feelings and learning to express them — allowed me to experience life in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible when I was young.

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Briefly

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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