David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

I miss the times when hard work
was more fun than entertainment

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I’ve realized this week how much I miss work.

If you’re around me in life these days, that might sound like a surprise. Each week, I’m counting down the days until I’m “on parole” from the office for a couple of days. All weekend, I dread Monday arriving again.

If you didn’t know any better, you would assume I hate work. You would assume I’m just lazy and want to play all the time. But you’d be wrong.

I miss loving my work so much that it was a bigger high than any drug I knew of. I miss the days when working long hours was more fun than any entertainment I might be missing. I miss the times when I was learning so much that I believed I was laying a foundation for building something bigger.

I miss working for something that was my own. Something with my name on it. Something nobody else could control. Something that was mine.

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Three years after she sneaked in, World’s Happiest Dog® is queen

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The first time I ever heard of Lucy, it was just a message from someone wanting me to help her find a home for a dog. That was all.

I absolutely, positively had no interest in adopting her. I was away from the house too much of the time and I was also just settling into a new house with the cats. There were too many things up in the air. The last thing I needed was another responsibility.

But I didn’t have any choice in the matter. Lucy adopted me.

A week or so before she came to my house, I went over to the apartment where she was living to take a couple of pictures of her. She was terrified of people. She was terribly unsure of herself.

The people who had rescued her from a chain when she was a puppy had too many animals and they were moving to a smaller place. She was the only one who didn’t make the cut to go to the new place. She was expendable.

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Identity crisis may be long-coming integration of warring parts of me

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I’ve been having an identity crisis.

For the last month or so — maybe longer — I’ve felt internal rumblings that left me uneasy. I turned inward and started reading a lot of psychology to help me understand what was going on.

At first, I felt confused and disoriented. I found myself questioning some key assumptions I’ve had about myself for many years. I felt very uncomfortable with the feeling that my internal narrative about who I am might be wrong.

But in the last couple of days, something has suddenly cleared up. It’s as though my mind suddenly zoomed out to a far longer view of my life.

I wasn’t just having an identity crisis for the last few weeks. I was experiencing the closure — integration might even be a better word — for something that started many years ago. This isn’t a crisis. This appears to be a point at which I’m merging parts of myself — stages of my life? — that I had never quite been able to put together.

I was 29 when I first realized I was having an identity crisis, but I still remember everything about that year.

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