Unhappiness can’t hide forever when life has gone very wrong

By David McElroy · April 17, 2021

I am miserably unhappy — and I have no idea what to do about it.

For years, I’ve danced around having to admit that to myself. When exactly did it start? I’m not sure. Maybe it started as soon as I became psychologically self-aware enough to see my life clearly. But I’ve never wanted to call it by its true name.

I’ve been able to admit that I was lonely. I’ve been able to admit to being crushed by not having the love and companionship I need. I’ve even been able to face the enormous consequences of losing what little semblance of family love I once had.

I’ve lied to myself. I’ve told myself I was fine except for this one thing or that other thing. The things I’ve told myself were true, as far as they went. I did so much difficult emotional work that I knew which pieces were missing. I knew which pieces of my core were damaged. I had excellent head knowledge.

But my message to myself was always a partial lie. It was a way to keep from sliding into the deep pit of misery from which it would be hard to return. But I haven’t been OK — not really — for a long time. Maybe I never have been.

All I know is that I have somehow deprived my life of love. And without love, there is no happiness, no meaning, no joy.

I grew up with a warped understanding of love. I’ve tried to talk about this before — in relation to my position with my dysfunctional family — but it feels so impossible to truly share with those who haven’t lived through it.

I know that many others have gone through some version of this dysfunctional family history. In fact, I know that many people suffered worse abuse than I did — many of the sort that left physical scars — but all I know is what I experienced. If others suffered something worse than I did, that doesn’t make the damage left inside me any less severe.

I have been searching for my place in this world ever since I was a little boy. I was searching for love and acceptance and understanding — all the things I instinctively felt were missing for me — and I was attracted to the sorts of worldly success that would never bring me what I needed.

I wanted to matter. I wanted to be important.

I worked hard for success. Sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I failed. But no matter what I did — no matter the praise or the money — it always felt empty. For a long time, I just thought I needed more. I needed more success, more money, more praise, more power. And I eventually gave up — when I realized how empty my path was.

Then I tried to pursue different things. Creative success can sometimes offer me a taste of relief from my anguish. There are many times when I write things which I know won’t be read or understand by a large audience — simply because expressing certain feelings or ideas can give me a momentary sense of relief from the monumental sadness that chases me. But it never lasts.

I am alone and lonely. I have had love come and go. At times, I have thrown it away — for reasons which never made sense after I’d done it. At other times, I’ve been disappointed and hurt by people I thought I could trust. I don’t even like most people, so it’s very difficult to find someone who I want to love. And so far, my desire to love hasn’t matched with the desire of another to love me, at least not at the same time.

I am miserable with the way I spend my life. I spend most of my work time doing tasks which I care nothing about. I haven’t found a way to earn a living from doing work which is meaningful to me. And I have so much trouble motivating myself to do work which I hate that I exhaust myself just functioning at a basic level — somehow surviving another Monday through Friday.

I have no real sense of community. Most of the people I consider friends are either shallow friendships or else people I’m in no position to spend time with, for one reason or another. The people who I do spend time with mostly remind me how alien I feel to be among them.

My only sources of joy are the animals in my life — three cats and a dog — and the times when I can create something which feels good and beautiful and authentic — typically a photograph or a piece of writing.

I know God is real and ever-present, but contrary to things said by those who claim a right spiritual life fixes everything, my knowledge and periodic experience of my Creator isn’t enough to change everything. I was designed to need food and water and work and love and a million other things. And it’s some combination of those things which is missing.

I am unhappy.

I resist saying those words. I don’t want to admit it, especially to myself. And that probably makes it all the more imperative that I face the truth.

I need love in my life. I don’t just mean, “It would be nice to have a wife or a girlfriend.” It’s more essential than that. I need a mutually loving partner just as much as I need food or water or air. I need understanding and companionship. I need family and community. I need renewed purpose.

I’ve always been a very good problem-solver. I take a rational approach to problems and I am very good at laying out a logical solution for pretty much whatever issue you can give me to solve. But I find myself paralyzed when it comes to fixing my own life. And I don’t know why.

For good or bad, for right or wrong, I’m simply not wired the way most people are. The things that make most people happy don’t work for me. And the lies which most people tell themselves — to quiet this raging unhappiness inside so many — won’t keep working for me, even as temporary diversion.

I am unhappy. I haven’t been wanting to admit it. I feel horribly vulnerable and shameful to admit it now. But if I’m ever to find the solutions which I need — to take the next emotionally healthy steps for my life — I have to tell myself the brutally honest truth.

And the truth is that I am unhappy. I don’t yet know what to do about it.

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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.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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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