Leopards might not change spots, but cowardly lions can gain courage

By David McElroy · September 4, 2011

Are you a coward? For much of my life, I’ve been one — at least a large part of the time. I’ve drifted along avoiding things that scared me, acting as though I could somehow cheat my fears without having to face them. I’m at the point in life where I can’t do that anymore.

I can either face the fears and become who I’m supposed to be or I can go back to hiding in cowardice. Now that I understand the truth about what I’ve done, though, I don’t think I can put it back into a box and hide it on a shelf. I have to confront the fears — and become the person God made me to be.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue since the first of the year. Something happened that made me ask myself whether I was going to continue being less than my best or if I intended to make the changes necessary to be who I wanted to be. If I’d realized all the implications of that when I started thinking about it, I might have run. But I didn’t. And once I let myself go down that road, I didn’t have any choice but to follow some trails to their logical conclusion.

Over the past few years, I’ve had to face the truth that I’ve sabotaged many things in my life. There have been times when I’ve stood on the brink of success and happiness, but I turned away because I was afraid. I had to come to an understanding of why I’d done that to myself. It wasn’t pleasant. It wasn’t easy to confront. But I think I’m a better man for having done it.

We mostly talk here about the future of society and the current insane political system, so this might not seem related, but I think it is. We’re facing some potentially scary times. People who are cowards are going to have trouble dealing with those times. Their personal lives are going to be wrecks and they’re not going to be able to stand up and do what’s right when the time comes that will require great courage.

Whether you choose to stay where you’re currently living or to move on to somewhere you might be able to build a new life for your family, times might be very hard. If you’ve been a typical, soft American consumer, you might not be ready for that. You might have even been like me — drifting along without fulfilling your potential or your dreams or even a calling. If so, this is a really good time to find some courage and put the cowardice aside. Now that my eyes are open to what I’d been doing to myself, I don’t have any other choice.

I might never become everything I want to become. I might never get all of my needs fulfilled. I might go to my grave with secret unfulfilled loves or needs. I might never feel that I can achieve all the things I missed out on by being a coward for this long. Maybe. But from now on, if I fail to have my needs and goals met, it won’t be because I didn’t go after them. It won’t be because I was a coward.

I’m angling for a “courage medal,” but I haven’t earned it yet. I just know I can’t live with myself anymore if I act like a coward.

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Something small just made me happy. The specifics don’t matter, but I found myself smiling and I felt a kind of warm joy filling my heart and mind. In that brief moment of ecstasy, I felt the irrational desire to talk with a particular person. It wasn’t a calculated thought or a rational want. It wasn’t even that I wanted to tell the person about this particular thing. I simply felt ecstatic joy — and I somehow connected that feeling to this person. I can’t explain it. If we’re wise, we’ll pay attention to such moments, because the instincts of our hearts and minds often know more truth than our conscious and rational brains do. The same thing can be true in moments of great pain and suffering. If we pay attention to who our hearts are drawn to in such moments — of extreme joy or extreme hurt — we learn something about ourselves. I don’t know why. I only know that our gut instincts sometimes understand deep truths about ourselves that our rational brains haven’t yet figured out.

It started out as a satirical joke, but some friends liked the idea, so now it’s a real Facebook profile picture frame. If you’ve never heard of Moms Against Virtue-Signaling, let me explain. One of the dumber elements of social media is that it allows people to publicly signal their goodness and virtue to others — without actually doing anything of substance. So you see photo frames around profile photos saying things such as, “Moms Against Racism,” as though they’re standing up against those evil moms who are in favor of racism. It’s meaningless virtue-signaling and it deserves to be mocked, so I made a frame and published it on Facebook’s frame system today. If you go to your own Facebook profile picture and add a frame, then search for Moms Against Virtue-Signaling, you can select it. About a dozen of my friends are using it so far. It’s just fun satire — at least until Facebook decides it “goes against our community standards.” Or something. It’s just a fun way of mocking something that deserves to be mocked.

When I first told you about the project that would become DavidMcElroy.TV, I thought it would launch by mid-May. Since today is the last day of May — and I’m still not close to launching a finished product — here’s a brief update. The graphic above is the latest rough mockup of the format, but it’s still subject to change. Even the logo isn’t yet set in stone. Motion graphics are really difficult when you’re starting from scratch. Sunday night, my camera stopped recording, so it has to be sent off for repair. I have an older camera that I’ll keep using for testing, but I can’t launch without the better one. The audio system developed a low buzz this weekend that has me puzzled. I’ll be taking all the equipment over to the home of a local audio engineer who’s volunteered to help me figure out what I’ve done wrong. On top of all that, my on-camera performance seems to get worse with each test I do. There are days when I think I’m crazy to be attempting this. And in truth, I probably am insane to do it, but being crazy has never stopped me before. I’m at least a month away from launch and it could be a few months. Thanks for being patient — and thanks for all the support and enthusiasm for the project that you’ve sent my way.

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.

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