David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

psychology

We’re neither friends nor enemies, just strangers who share the past

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The man walked into something like a cave and saw stalactites hanging from the roof. But these weren’t normal mineral formations. Each one contained the face and memories of someone important from his past.

I heard the man’s story this week in a book about experimental drug-assisted psychotherapy. During the experience, his unconscious was creating symbols for things it was pushing into his consciousness. And the man could have conversations with these people from the past, in a way that felt completely real to him.

I found this story oddly frightening. I imagined what it would feel like to encounter such people from my past. It gave me shivers, but it’s hard to explain why. All I can say is that when I close the door on someone from the past, I prefer not to re-open the door to something dead. I’d rather allow the memories to stand on their own.

And I’ve lived something of a waking nightmare for the past couple of days — as I’ve vividly experienced conversations with women who have been dead to me.

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Society needs storytellers to help make sense of a changing world

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If I could start my adult life over, I would do some things differently.

Knowing what I know now, I would avoid the newspaper business entirely. I also wouldn’t have spent two decades working in politics. What would I do instead?

I would become a filmmaker, an academic or a psychologist. Those three might sound rather different, but I’ve thought seriously about all three. The more I think consider it, the more sense it makes — because all three are different faces of something I do quite naturally.

You see, I’m a storyteller.

The sculptures you see above in the fountain at Five Points South in Birmingham are collectively called “The Storyteller.” The guy with the goat head is the storyteller himself. It was intended to convey the importance of storytelling in the South’s oral tradition.

Everything I’ve ever done was about storytelling in one way or another. In newspapers, I told stories and helped weave a coherent community narrative as I edited newspapers. In politics, I created narratives about clients which I sold to a gullible public.

If I could start life again, I would use storytelling in a different way. Filmmakers, academics and psychologists are at their best when they tell stories. They weave meaningful narratives to help confused people find their way in a world which is changing.

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My bad teen poetry suggests I’ve always hungered for missing love

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I could still show you the spot where Gail introduced herself to me back in the eighth grade at Jasper Junior High School.

It was just a few weeks into the school year. I was near the library in a downstairs hallway. It was between classes, so the hall was crowded with students. But within seconds, it would seem as though there was nobody there other than this beautiful blue-eyed girl and me.

Gail said she had realized that our fathers worked together, so she wanted to introduce herself. I don’t remember what else was said. But it was love at first sight for me — or whatever it is that a 13-year-old boy is mature enough to feel.

For the next three years, I was crazy about her and worshipped her, mostly from afar. By the time we were high school juniors, the fever had ended and she was just another classmate. When we were seniors, we were casual friends. In the second semester of our freshman year of college, we started dating. We were together for three years and even got engaged before eventually going our separate ways.

I didn’t know it then — and rarely realized it later — but my lifelong pursuit of the right woman to love me had its roots in an unconscious childhood need for love which I couldn’t find.

I came to identify love with painful longing.

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