David McElroy

When people look at me, they see an illusion. They don’t see the real me.

That’s true of you, too. Some of what others see in us is the illusion we project. Another big part of what they see — probably the biggest part — comes from their unconscious assumptions about human beings. And a bit of it is actual truth that leaks out through the cracks in the masks we wear.

You could spend your life studying one solitary person — as a full-time job — and still not understand every single thing there is to know about that person. Humans are too complex on the inside. We often have little understanding of ourselves. Even the best of us keep discovering new things that later seem obvious.

Since it’s impossible to know another person completely — and few are even interested — it’s natural that we would develop quick abstractions for those we see around us. We project what we want to see onto those we perceive as good or even ideal. We project what we expect to see (or fear we’ll see) onto those we perceive as bad. We go through life with this rough shorthand about others. It’s horribly inaccurate, but it’s good enough to allow us to survive.

Most people go through life believing they are known and understood by others — and that they know others, too. Some of us know better, though, and that leaves us feeling unbearably alone.

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I found you a thousand times
Guess you’ve done the same
But then we lose each other
It’s just like a children’s game
— Harry Chapin, “Circle”

I’ve had a terrible week. It wouldn’t look that way from the outside, but I’ve felt tortured inside.

It started Monday with a disagreement over the way I’ve managed a part of my company’s investment real estate. There was no argument. There was nothing nasty. It was just a philosophical disagreement that I’ve bumped up against numerous times in the last couple of years.

I’m confident about my approach and about the financial results I’ve consistently achieved with the property, but an investor was fretting about some expenses I was approving for maintenance and repairs. Investors never like to spend money — and I felt the icy judgment of his disapproving words. It felt like a personal attack, even though it wasn’t personal. I seriously wanted to quit. Right then and there.

The next day, I reported some income figures to the same investor. He was ecstatic, because I was bringing in cash better than he ever had when he managed the property for himself. He praised me, as he’s done on other occasions — and I felt elated.

Then the clear truth hit me. My self-worth is far too tied up in whether I make someone happy with me or not. I can be incredibly high or disturbingly low, depending on whether someone approves of me. And it’s not emotionally healthy to be affected that way.

I’ve learned this lesson a hundred times, but I keep forgetting — just as I forget dozens of important lessons — so I keep having to learn them all over again.

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Everybody knew Kent wasn’t going to last long. He had been hired as sports editor of a small daily newspaper — and he was a disaster from the beginning.

I watched it all happen because I was managing editor of a small weekly in the same company. I had friends in the daily paper’s newsroom who were telling me everything as it happened. In his first week on the job, he and a local high school football coach were talking privately about a star player for an opposing team who had been injured in a shooting a couple of years before. A bullet had been left in his head after the shooting because it was too close to his brain. It was a miracle that he had returned to play football.

Kent and the coach were talking about the player and were jokingly referring to him as “Bullet Brain” in their private conversation, but Kent didn’t have the judgment to know this wasn’t something to be made public, so he quoted the coach — in a story that ran in the paper — calling the opposing player “Bullet Brain.”

He wasn’t fired, but he clearly wasn’t going to work out.

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