David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

Who are you trying to impress? Answer may explain who you are

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This seems to be reunion season. College and high school classes all over the place are getting together to reminisce about old times and to nervously eye each other — with many thinking, “I don’t look that bad yet, do I?”

I know at least half a dozen people who’ve been to reunions in the last month. For some, it’s just fun, but for others it’s a time of sober reflection. When I talked with one friend today, he told me his reaction to seeing his classmates from not that long ago.

“Being there has me thinking about some things,” he said. “I looked around that night and realized these were the people who I grew up wanting to impress — and when I look at them now, I can’t figure out why I ever cared what they thought of me.”

When you were a small child, you wanted to impress your parents, maybe your siblings, maybe extended family and family friends. As you got older, the circle of people you wanted to impress changed. You wanted to impress your peers. Then you wanted to impress romantic interests. Your audience kept changing.

But at every point in your life, your choice about who to impress has said very loudly who you are.

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Little boy for whom I was named shows what my mother hoped for

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When I was born, parents didn’t know whether they were getting a boy or a girl until birth, so they often had two names ready. If I had been a girl, I would have been Susan. Instead, I was David Michael.

When I was young, people would often comment that my sisters and I all had “Bible names,” so they assumed we were named after Bible characters. But my mother let me know that I wasn’t named for Israel’s King David, even though I adored his exploits because of our shared names.

No, I was named for an inventive little boy who appeared in a series of elementary school reading books. My mother taught young children from these books. And I still have a copy of one of the books from which she taught. The one I have is called “More Friends Old and New,” which had been in print in some form or other since 1912.

I was leafing through this battered old copy tonight — reading the story called “Wheels for David” — and realized that my mother made a good choice. She gave me something to live up to.

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I’ve struggled to finally believe there’s more than one ‘right way’

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Is there a wrong way to fold a bath towel? For people like me, that’s a trick question. There’s only one right way. Every other way but mine is wrong.

I was 10 years old when I decided how towels ought to be folded. My sisters and I did the laundry in our household — they were 8 and 6 — and I decided that our inconsistent ways of folding towels had to change. Our current towels were neatly stacked, but there was no system about how they were folded or turned in the stack.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how I thought they looked best. I talked with my sisters about it. Then I settled on one particular method. From that moment on, that became the way to fold towels in our household. It wasn’t just “our way.” It was “the right way.”

A lot of us have preferences about such things, but not everybody internalizes that his way — of thinking, of doing things, of believing — is the one and only way. This was a pattern of my perfectionistic thinking for most of my life — and it’s still a struggle for me to realize there can be other ways that are just as right as my own.

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