For first time in my life, I fear not finding love and life I’ve needed

By David McElroy · August 29, 2021

When I was a little boy, the wait for Christmas each year seemed to take forever. Even in the summer — or even after school had started back in the fall — the weeks until Christmas went by at a snail’s pace.

If you can remember being a child — and dreaming about what you might get for Christmas or whatever holiday your family celebrated — you probably remember feeling the same way.

When you’re 5 years old, the time until another Christmas represents 20 percent of the time you’ve been alive. That might as well have been forever back then.

When I thought about what I would be in the future — when I got old enough to start having oversized ambitions for myself — my life seemed to stretch to eternity. My parents had lived half their lives. My grandparents have lived most of theirs. But I had forever to become what I was meant to be.

For the first time in my life, I feel a clock ticking. I no longer have forever. I have decades left in which I can live and love, but the years are flying by. The time from one Christmas to the next is now a blur.

I still have plenty of time, but it’s no longer forever. And for the first time in my life, I’m feeling a fear I’ve never known. What if I don’t find the love and the life I’ve always needed?

I was 25 years old when I started my first company. I was ambitious and impatient, so I was annoyed that it took me so long. I was 27 when I started my first publication. I started another newspaper — and then bought an advertising magazine — shortly afterward. I was impatient. Things were taking too long.

When everything fell apart for me around the time I turned 30 — for reasons beyond my control — I was crushed and humiliated. I spent a year too depressed to do much of anything, but I was reassured to know I had still forever left in front of me. My future still seemed to stretch so far that it might as well be forever.

I took a series of detours. I worked for a large newspaper chain as a publisher. Then I got into politics and made a lot of money. Then I seemed to get far, far off course. As things crumbled in my personal life — and I started questioning all of my assumptions about the meaning of life — I walked away from my political career.

I slowly spent the money I’d saved. I drifted. But even then, I still felt as though I had forever — almost forever, anyway — to get back on track. To find love. To start a family. To be satisfied with whatever I made my life into.

I don’t like much of my life right now, but I’m no longer the arrogant and confident punk who knew how to fix everything. I’m no longer the guy who knew everything. I’m no longer the guy who was so sure the world would be happy to give me everything I asked for.

I’m psychologically and emotionally healthier than I was when I was that hard-charging young man. I know that I don’t know everything. I have more questions than answers, even about things which I felt certain about not so many years ago. What’s more, I’m happier to confess that I’m not right about everything.

I’ve been wrong often enough that I’ve had to develop some humility.

I’m finally starting to become who I should have been from the beginning. I’m smarter and wiser. I’m more compassionate. I know how to love in ways that I didn’t understand back then. I’m still a work in progress, but I finally feel as though I’ve developed myself enough to at least begin my life.

I’m ready to live more wisely. To understand what’s important in life. And to be the husband and father that I didn’t know how to be when I was young.

But now that I finally feel prepared to run this race, I see that the clock is ticking and I’m suddenly panicked. I look at the lives that most people around me have built — and I realize how empty most of their lives are — but at least they’ve built something they can show. Something they can be proud of. And I’m prideful enough to feel ashamed that I don’t have the things to offer which I once had.

It’s not that I feel it’s too late for me. It’s not that I feel I can’t possibly have the love and the life I need. It’s simply that I feel like someone who’s way behind — and for the first time in my life, fear has been creeping into my mind. Fear that I might never find the things I’ve craved all my life.

I wouldn’t trade places with anybody I know. That might sound odd, because I know quite a number of people who are wealthy and successful. But the more I know about such people’s lives — no matter how much people praise them — the more I see the negative things which I’ve learned to avoid.

It’s a tradeoff. I’ve grown in psychological and emotional ways that I don’t think most people ever bother with — and I’ve learned that life wasn’t worth much without that difficult growth.

Maybe I’m exactly where I need to be. I’d like to think so. I’d like to think that I’ll soon find the healthy love I need. That I’ll soon have the family I’ve wanted. That I’ll soon be on a path to something positive with people I love.

I thought I was ready to run this race when I was young, but I was sorely unprepared. Now that I’m finally prepared, I see myself back at the start again — and I see that others have already run half the race, maybe more.

My goals are far different than they once were. I’m thankful for what I’ve become and for the ways in which I continue to grow. But I’m terrified to realize that there’s a clock ticking. That I no longer have forever. That I might not find the love I need. That I might be stuck with what I have now.

These are new fears for me and I don’t like them.

If I wake up in a week or a month or a year and find that I’ve found the love and the life I need, I’ll be relieved to give the fears up. But as I sit alone in my office at 4 in the morning — wishing I knew how to finally find what I need — the entire house is silent.

The only thing I hear is an imaginary clock that seems to be ticking more loudly each day.

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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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