David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

My unconscious choices on love say much about women and me

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I fall in love only when I find the perfect woman.

That will sound strange at best and dysfunctional at worst, because we all know there’s no such thing as a perfect woman (or a perfect man). So what exactly do I mean?

For weeks, I’ve been pondering the question of what makes me fall in love with one woman when I have absolutely no feelings for one who might seem equally desirable. I’ve needed to understand the reasons, but my feelings had seemed random and hard to explain.

Then I woke up around 4 a.m. Tuesday and I suddenly knew. My unconscious mind worked it out in my sleep, apparently. It’s not a perfect answer, but it’s a model of my emotional reality which makes sense to me. What’s more, I could insert every woman I’ve fallen in love with — which I can count on one hand — and the formula worked.

I fall in love with a woman whose current reality — and future potential — come closest to adding up to my idea of perfection. Because of this, my unconscious choices can tell you a lot about what I see in a woman and they can also tell you quite a bit about me.

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Voice of harsh inner critic still sucks joy from my creative life

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My inner critic is constantly busy. Every time I think I’m making progress on quieting his harsh criticism, he pops up again — ready to tell me that my work is no good and that I’m not good enough.

This isn’t anything new. I’ve talked about it before. But since my father died four months ago, I’ve had moments when I thought maybe that voice had died with him. For now, though, the voice is still there, at least part of the time.

This afternoon, I received a really nice note on Instagram from someone who I don’t know. This person posts really high-quality shots of nature and recently started following one of my accounts.

“Hello!” this fellow photographer wrote. “I just wanted to say your photos are so amazing, especially the recent ones! You’ve become my favorite account to follow. Keep up the fantastic work. All the best.”

A sane and reasonable person would feel happy with such praise, but my harsh inner critic seemed to hear only four words: “…especially the recent ones.” So that must mean the things that aren’t recent must be terrible. Why else would he have felt the need to qualify his praise? Right? Something in me felt crushed.

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World is a surreal alien landscape where nothing makes sense to me

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People sometimes play practical jokes on someone by having everyone in a group pretend not to notice something obvious — an unusual sound, for instance. When the target of the joke mentions the sound — a drum beating or a horn blowing or something else — others seem oblivious and nonchalant, acting more and more as though they believe the person who hears the sound is joking — or maybe hearing things that aren’t there.

For much of my adult life, I’ve had a vague sense that almost everybody in the world is playing such a practical joke on me. I’ve halfway expected someone to finally laugh and say, “OK, we’ve been pulling your leg. Did you almost believe we were all crazy? Or did you think you were crazy?”

And that’s just it. I have a horrible sense that the world around me is fundamentally insane — or else I’m insane. Because if what I perceive of the world is real and accurate, the world is fundamentally nuts. But if the world is sane and rational, I must be insane to perceive it as making so little sense.

I’ve never really harbored any suspicions that I was the unknowing center of something like “The Truman Show,” but I’ve often thought that such a bizarre thing would explain a lot — because the world as I experience it makes no sense, unless everybody is putting me on.

You see, I have a strong need for the world to make sense — and little about this world seems sane to me. So am I crazy? Or is the world as irrational as I perceive it to be?

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