I thought I saw her face — and I whispered, ‘Are you proud of me?’

By David McElroy · October 5, 2024

The woman was tall and strikingly beautiful. There was something about her that made her stand out in a loud restaurant that was packed almost shoulder to shoulder late Friday night. Then she turned her face toward me.

I gasped, at least inwardly. Was that her? It was her, but it couldn’t be. The restaurant was so loud and packed that nobody could have heard me, but I felt my lips move involuntarily.

“Are you proud of me?” I whispered.

For a brief moment, our eyes met. She was beautiful. She had a powerful presence. But it wasn’t her.

She was leaving through one door and I was heading out the door on the other side of the place. Then she was gone and I was in my car. I put the key into the ignition, but I didn’t start the car. I just sat there thinking about what had just happened.

I had thought for a moment that she was someone who I once loved. I was mistaken, but just thinking it was her made me realize — because of the question I blurted out — that I still want her to be proud of me. Even after all these years.

I feel as though my life has been stuck on a very long detour since about 2008. Or was it 2009? I’ve lost track.

In some ways, most of my adult life has been a series of detours. Regardless what came before, though, the last 15 years stand out as time spent wandering in metaphorical wilderness. It hasn’t been 40 years — and I haven’t entered my Promised Land — but it’s been a long and slow climb out of the worst part of my life.

After a romantic relationship failed — for complicated reasons that no longer matter — I entered a period of depression. I was already getting out of political consulting, but the depression left me unable to figure out what to do next. And I floundered.

Over the next few years, I spent all the money I had left from my high-income years in politics. I ended up broke. I had no family. I had no prospects of a family or a new career. The goals that I still had seemed like pie in the sky for someone who was as lost as I’d become.

In 2014, I thought I’d found a reason to live — so to speak — and I thought things were heading in the right direction. But that was a dead end, too, and I ended up lower than ever.

In the decade since then, I’ve started from scratch. I bought a cheap house that I was embarrassed to live in. I took a job — at a college — that I honestly felt was beneath me. But given how far I’d allowed myself to slide, I had to start somewhere.

And for 10 years, I’ve worked steadily to slowly dig my way out of the hole into which I’d fallen.

I’m slowly improving the house that embarrassed me. It’s still not a place where I’d be proud to show off to a potential wife, but I can see how it might finally get there in the next year or so.

My income still isn’t what it was when I worked in politics. Back then, I made better than six figures a year — and much more than that some years. I’m running a small real estate company as a broker now, so I’m doing decently.

For the first time in a long time, I’m starting to see myself as having something to offer to a woman of the caliber who I tend to fall for. There’s nobody who interests me right now, but for the first time in a long time, I would feel as though I had a potential life to offer to the right woman.

And I’ve been realizing lately that I’m proud of myself for all these things. Tonight, I realized that I want a woman to be proud of me for these things, too.

I don’t know why I felt that way when I thought I saw this particular woman. I’m not sure if this experience was really about her or if the memory of her love was a stand-in for a love who I’d like to have today. I’m not sure it matters to answer that right now.

I’m not holding onto the hope of renewed love from someone in the past. This isn’t limerence. This is something that men have experienced for as long as men and women have wanted one another and chosen someone else with whom to build families.

A man wants to do good things with his life. He wants to be productive. He wants to solve problems. He wants to fix things in his life. He wants to build a life that is worthy of attracting the sort of woman he might love. He wants to be worthy of attracting a good woman.

There was a time — when I was quite young — that I was arrogant enough to believe my talent and intelligence were impressive enough that anybody would be lucky to have me. I mostly felt that way professionally, but even when it came to my personal life, I was convinced that my potential was so impressive that anybody would see how far I might go.

Today, my aims are lower. My goals are more short-term and more concrete. I’d still like to do some much bigger things, but if those never happen, I’m OK with that.

I just want to keep building a life that a woman would be proud of — something that would make the right woman say, “I can see a real future with this man.”

I don’t know who that woman might be. I just know that I want to keep slowly rebuilding my life — to the point that the right woman is soon going to see me and see what I’ve done. And she’s going to be impressed in some little way. Then she’s going to get to know me more closely and she’s going to decide she’s proud of me. In time, she might even decide she wants to be my wife.

And that’s what I think it really meant tonight when I involuntarily asked whether this woman — this abstract woman who wasn’t really there — was proud of me.

I don’t know who she is. I just know that I’m eager for the day when the right woman will be proud of me — proud enough to choose me as the man she wants to spend the rest of her life with.

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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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