I’m shutting the whole world out, but I’m also waiting to be rescued

By David McElroy · July 11, 2021

I was borderline rude with an acquaintance in public today. And that’s not like me.

I don’t know the man well, but we always have a friendly chat when we run into each other. When he approached me in a restaurant Sunday evening, I just wanted him to go away. I wanted everyone to go away. He asked me how I was doing.

“Well, to be honest, I’m in a mood when I’d rather just have the whole world leave me alone,” I said.

I tried not to make it sound personal, but I wasn’t in the mood to explain. I made another comment or two, but I pointedly turned my attention to my MacBook’s screen.

He sat down near me and kept trying to chat. I replied as little as I could and I kept my eyes on the screen. He eventually finished eating and said goodbye. I told him I’d probably be more social again the next time he saw me.

After he left, I thought about the apparent contradiction in me today. I’ve been emotionally drowning on the inside, for a couple of reasons. I have walls up against the whole world and I don’t want to let anyone inside. I want to be left alone.

But I’ve also been a lost little boy — waiting for someone to rescue me.

When I was a child, it never occurred to me that anyone could rescue me. The idea would have seemed ludicrous. It would have sounded impossible. And I would have thought it was weak.

I always felt that I was alone against the world. I always thought I could be my own champion, my own rescuer, my own hero.

I didn’t need anyone.

I felt that way because there was no one for me to count on. Why believe in a fairy tale rescue for myself when I was alone against a world that left me increasingly numb and cold?

It took me a long time to realize this, but my intense desire to rescue others — cats, dogs and even people — was partly a matter of me projecting my desire to rescue myself. Something in my unconscious believed that by rescuing others, I was somehow rescuing myself.

And maybe I believed — in a deep part of myself that I can’t quite access — that if I rescued others enough, I might be worthy of someone else rescuing me.

I’ve bumped up against these ideas here before. I’ve written about the realization that the cats and dogs I rescued were rescuing me at the same time. I’ve also written about my instinctive understanding that relationships between people who’ve been hurt are ultimately about mutual rescue.

There’s a common idea in some modern pop psychology that two people in a relationship shouldn’t need in each other. The notion is that two partners should want one another but they shouldn’t actually need each other. They should each be independent enough to stand alone.

I get the concept, but I think it’s bunk. I think we’re so hesitant to put complete trust in a partnership that we’ve developed an ideology — and morphed it into psychology — that the two partners don’t need to fuse into an inseparable partnership.

I think that idea is wrong and dangerous. It goes against all of human history up until the last 50 years or so. In the best relationships, each person brings the best he or she has to offer — and trusts the other person to be strong at times in places where he or she is weak or broken.

I think we’re all broken. It just takes some of us a lot longer to understand that and then to accept it.

I have enough pride that I don’t want help from anybody. I don’t want to accept help, much less ask for it. I have so much trouble trusting that anybody could finally be worth my complete trust that I’m always looking for a reason not to trust.

I usually find that reason not to trust — and then I pull back.

For all these reasons, I have thick walls against the rest of the world. It seems safer. It’s less risky. There’s less chance of hurt or rejection or disappointment.

But English writer C.S. Lewis gave a powerful rebuke to this fear-based desire of my heart.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable,” Lewis wrote. “Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

I think this is why I have to rescue others, whether it’s cats or dogs or people I meet. This is my only defense against locking myself up so tightly that no one can ever get inside to rescue me.

In the meantime, I have to keep living with a contradiction which is more visible at some times than others. I’ll keep locking myself — at least partly, when I hurt the worst — against the vast majority of this fallen world.

But I’ll try to tear down the wall around my heart when I can. At least a little. I’ll try to stay vulnerable. I’ll try to let myself hold onto faith and hope — and especially love.

In my most secret heart, I believe the day will come when I can rescue the right woman — and it will turn out that she has arrived to rescue the lost little boy inside me at the same time.

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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.

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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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