Hope can be dangerous when the path ahead is dark and uncertain

By David McElroy · December 1, 2024

Oh, I don’t wanna be alone
I wanna find a home
And I wanna share it with you
— Maggie Heath, “Hello My Old Heart”

I’ve been so busy for the last few years that I haven’t had time to hope.

I’ve been busy with a real estate brokerage. I’ve been consumed by trying to figure out how to write and produce a video series about how to escape from our dysfunctional culture. And I’ve been focused on how to slowly renovate my old house and improve my financial condition.

In the meantime, my heart was locked away. I successfully distracted myself — for the most part — from my need for love and family and community.

But then I fell into a hole a few weeks ago. Like Alice falling down a rabbit hole into Wonderland, I found myself in a place — metaphorically speaking — where things didn’t quite make sense. The pieces didn’t fit into a coherent narrative. It’s been more like finding puzzle pieces and not knowing what they might be, but somehow feeling as though they’re meaningful.

It all started in a grocery store.

I was at Walmart one night a few weeks ago when I suddenly became aware of all the products on display that were aimed at people preparing for their family Thanksgiving dinners. It wasn’t anything unusual. It was the same sorts of displays you see every year around this time.

But I suddenly felt very emotional. Something hit me hard enough that I wanted to cry — for no apparent reason.

Then I realized that I was jealous of all those people who were about to be celebrating this holiday with their families. I’m cynical enough about families in postmodern America that I knew that many of those people — maybe even most of them — would be unhappy to be spending time with families they didn’t like. I know what it’s like to be forced to spend holiday time around dysfunctional families and unhappy people, but that’s not what I focused on that night.

Instead, I was thinking about families who really loved each other. I was thinking about emotionally healthy and well-adjusted husbands and wives who were raising their children in loving and healthy ways.

And then I realized — not for the first time — how much I wanted that for myself.

A few days later, I needed to find some information that I knew was in an old text message somewhere on my iPhone, so I typed in a search phrase that I thought should be obscure enough to find just what I wanted. The second item that came up on the list contained what I was looking for, but before I got to that, I made the mistake of tapping on a different conversation — one which was with someone who I haven’t talked with in years.

It was a conversation with a woman who I once loved. I don’t know why I kept reading. It wasn’t really noteworthy, but maybe that’s what made it oddly compelling.

It was just a conversation between two people who loved each other. She was with the family she grew up with — spending a few days for a holiday at the time — and she was in the middle of an emotional crisis with a couple of people in her family. It wasn’t even that big a deal, but it was something hurtful to her.

The details don’t matter at this point, but as I read about it, I was vividly reminded what it felt like to be loved and needed and wanted. In her time of emotional need, she wanted to be with me. She wanted me to comfort her. She wanted me to love her and soothe her, because she loved me.

When I closed that conversation, I immediately realized that what I was feeling wasn’t about that woman. She and I have long since moved in very different directions. It was merely a powerful reminder of what it felt like to be loved and needed — by someone else.

There have been other odd things that pushed similar buttons lately. A couple of night ago, I awakened in the middle of the night feeling confused. I found myself living out a scene from the Leo Tolstoy novel, “Anna Karenina,” at least emotionally. I was the character of Levin early in the novel, when he was falling in love with Princess Ekaterina (Kitty) and was terrified at feeling unworthy of loving her.

Why? I don’t know. But as my confusion faded and I realized it had just been an odd dream, it seemed meaningful.

I don’t like to start thinking about my need for love and family, simply because it’s too easy to become obsessed again about what I don’t have — to think too much about what I haven’t yet found.

I don’t like to think about that too much, because it’s too easy to lose myself in that. It’s too easy to become distracted by the love I want, by the family I want, by the loving home I want.

I start thinking about the house I’d like to build and I start thinking about the family I’d like to build within its walls. It’s a beautiful vision and it makes my heart beat again — but it’s a terrifying thing to give myself over to hope when I know of nothing I can do to make the vision into reality.

I feel as though I’m far behind where I needed to be at this point it life. It took me years to get myself emotionally healthy enough to be the sort of partner I’d like to be for an emotionally healthy woman. It took me years to feel healthy enough to be the kind of father I want to be. (I was afraid for many years that I might be something like my narcissistic father and I was unwilling to do that to children.)

And now that I finally feel ready to pursue what others might have pursued in their 20s or 30s, I feel as though I’m wandering on a path where I can’t see what’s ahead of me. I feel as though I’m walking along a path through a forest. It’s foggy around me and I have a blindfold over my eyes. All I can do is either stand where I am — or else take one step after another forward, without any idea where I’m going.

I have a lot of things I need to be doing right now. The real estate brokerage needs a lot of work. I have a lot of art and commentary that I need to write and produce. And I need to keep making money to improve my life.

But this unexpected recent trip down a rabbit hole has reminded me that my heart is still waiting for the healthy love that it’s been needing for a very long time.

Note: The lines that I quoted at the start are from the Oh Hellos song, “Hello My Old Heart,” which I found myself thinking about as I wrote this. The song is embedded below. I don’t know this to be the case, but I strongly suspect that songwriter Maggie Heath was inspired on this subject by what C.S. Lewis wrote about hiding a heart away in his book “The Four Loves.”

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