David McElroy

I was very confident, but I was also nervous. It was hard to say which feeling was stronger.

I was sitting in an auditorium on a late Saturday morning about 16 years ago. The auditorium was full. Maybe 600 people? 800? I don’t recall. We were waiting for a block of short films to start showing at the Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival in Birmingham. Most people were there to watch films. I was there to finally find out whether an audience liked my own first film.

My companion that morning was a girlfriend with whom I had a complicated relationship. Things didn’t end well for us, but I’ll always be grateful for her support that day.

I was nervous by the time the lights dimmed for the first short to start. My film was about the fourth in line, so I sat through several others first. I had never been to a film festival before, so I had just assumed the films would be good. I couldn’t tell anybody — because it would have sounded prideful — but I thought the other films were mostly terrible.

My film finally started. I held my breath. Would they laugh? We got to the first punchline. The audience roared with laughter. I was so happy that I wanted to cry.

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Do you want to stop me from trying something new? Just make me face the reality that my first attempt won’t be perfect.

Do you want to stop me from getting better at something new I’ve tried? Just show me how much better everybody else’s work is. Show me the best example of that work from someone else and then wait while a voice whispers, “See? You’re not good enough.”

I’m a quitter. The twin demons named Fear and Shame stand guard over my dreams. They taunt me. As long as I stick to things I find easy, they leave me alone. But when I look at my dreams again — or if I dare to start working toward one of those dreams — they spring into action.

“You’re not good enough,” Shame hisses. “Look how good all these other people are. They’ll laugh at your incompetence.”

“You’re going to do all this work and find out you have no talent,” Fear whispers. “You’re better off doing what you already know how to do. It might not make any money, but you’re good at it — so you won’t be embarrassed.”

I listen to these demons — and then I quietly find a thousand reasons not to do the things I want to do. It happened again this week.

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I sometimes remember the future very clearly.

That notion violates everything we think we know about the world. We remember the past. We imagine the future. Everybody knows that.

But, still. Something in my heart remembers the future — and the truth of that future is often more clear to me — more real — than my memories of the past.

There are two parts of me and it’s hard to say which is the real me. One part of me has his feet firmly planted in the material reality around me. The other part sees and feels and experiences something beyond all that — but it’s vague and murky, as though I’m seeing it through a heavy fog.

The first part of me is grounded in “common sense” and in the material reality which we grow up learning about. But the second part of me — the part of me which consistently sees the woman and our home and my children — is grounded somewhere between spooky mysticism and the mysteries of quantum mechanics.

“Why do we remember the past, but not the future?” physicist Stephen Hawking once asked.

Quantum mechanics suggests that the future already exists. Common sense says that’s nonsense. My heart can’t argue about physics, but I long for a future I’ve already seen.

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