David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

psychology

If I look closely at my old self, there’s a lot which is now dead

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Did you ever play Angry Birds on your phone?

I’ve never spent time playing serious video games, but I enjoyed that silly casual game when it first came out for the iPhone and I kept playing new levels as they were released for several years. Until this weekend, I hadn’t launched the game for a long, long time, but I played it for a few minutes Saturday.

Playing the game made me feel nostalgic and it put me in the frame of mind of that time in my life — around 10 years ago — when I was still playing it. It reminded me warmly of playing Angry Birds and Train Yard with a girlfriend who loved me to bring my iPad to her apartment so she could play, too.

I smiled warmly until a thought suddenly wiped that smile off my face. Thinking about those games and that part of my life made me realize something I had never consciously realized. I used to do something to that girlfriend which annoyed her — just to tease her — and I can’t believe that was me.

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Loss of everything you value can be a new beginning, not the end

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“Do you understand that I love you, not the things you do?”

That’s how I started my sales pitch. I didn’t have time to think about how to make my case, so I was just speaking from my heart. But I felt a lot of pressure, because I knew I would lose the woman I loved if I didn’t make my case effectively — and only she would decide whether she believed me.

I’ve been trying for days to figure out how to explain this dream. It’s too complicated to explain all the pieces, but it feels too meaningful to ignore. For weeks, I’ve been having complex dreams which played out bits and pieces of a story, but the unexpected turning point came in a dream earlier this week.

In the earlier parts of the dreams, she and I had been working on repairing a house. It was a beautiful house where we were going to live together as soon as we married. The house seemed both literal and symbolic. It was to be our home and it also represented the work we were doing to be emotionally healthy together.

But in the latest part of the story, her life completely fall apart.

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Some of us don’t seem ‘wired up’ to stay sane working for others

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Every time I work for someone else, I spend a lot of time fantasizing about quitting.

I love work. I enjoy being productive. I get excited about accomplishing goals. But I chafe when I work for others. It doesn’t matter who the boss is. It doesn’t matter how well he treats me. If I must take orders from someone else, I’m unhappy — no matter how nicely the orders are given.

Early in my life, I always blamed the boss. For years, I thought that each boss I had was dumber than the last one. I’ve told you before about how my arrogance about my boss almost got me fired from my first full-time job. (I really should have been fired, but luck got me promoted instead.)

The pattern continued. Every boss I had seemed terminally stupid. I knew more than they did and I had no respect for them. Even though I obeyed their orders — for the most part, at least grudgingly — I chafed and I knew I could have done their jobs better than they did.

It took me a long time to have an epiphany.

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