David McElroy

I no longer recognize the person I was when I was 25 years old.

I don’t quite know who I was. I was managing editor of a small daily newspaper. I was good at my job. I was brash. Ambitious. Arrogant. I knew it all. I was going to change the world.

And that precocious and baby-faced man was married, too.

I rarely mention having been married back then, although I wrote about it here a couple of years ago. In fact, I rarely think about it. That’s a part of my life that feels completely foreign to me now. It’s almost as though it never happened.

Even though she and I have been divorced for years now, I still have the highest regard for the woman I married back then. We still have friendly correspondence every now and then. I’m very happy that she married a man who seems perfect for her. They have a fine son and they’re both college journalism professors.

When we married, I thought she was my soulmate. I thought our marriage was for life. So what happened? Was I wrong to think we were soulmates? Or was it something else?

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How many friends do you have? Do you have any idea anymore? Or do you even know what the word “friend” means now?

I ran across a discussion earlier today among funeral directors about how many people typically attend funerals. Although they all knew of some large and showy funerals, most were more familiar with the ones at which few people showed up.

One guy said that 10 to 15 people was typical for him. Another thought it might be closer to 40. But the numbers were shockingly small, except in cases of large, close-knit families with a lot of local relatives.

How many Facebook “friends” do you have? It’s bothered me for years that the folks at the company use that word, because their idea of friends is very different than mine. At one point, I had 5,000 Facebook “friends” — which is the limit for a personal account — and even after aggressively deleting and blocking people for years, I still have about 500.

But how many of those people are really my friends? How many would show up at my funeral?

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I’ve spent most of my life learning to let go of the things I thought were important.

My father almost turned me into a narcissist. Just like him. I didn’t know that, of course. He didn’t know that, either. I didn’t understand he was a narcissist, because I didn’t even know what clinical narcissism was. It never would have occurred to me, because my father — the god-like central figure of my childhood — was my standard for all that was right and normal.

I’ve spent my adult life on a long journey of recovery. It started while I was still in my late 20s when I vaguely realized something was wrong. That led to the realization that I had come from a very dysfunctional family. But I still had so many layers of dysfunction to take apart — and I had so much to learn in order to become an emotionally healthy adult.

Even now, I keep finding more habits to unlearn. I keep realizing that I have beliefs that need to change. But as I take apart the old pieces of ugly dysfunction — brick by brick — I slowly replace them with something better.

I’m slowly becoming an emotionally healthy man.

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