David McElroy

What happens when everything in you says you need to jump off a metaphorical cliff and believe with all your heart that a net will be there to catch you? My inner child is about to find out.

After I left political consulting about 10 years ago, I never really got my life back on track. I knew what I needed to do. I knew what I wanted to do. But I found plenty of reasons not to pursue the work I was called to. I was afraid — and it was easy to explain to others why I wasn’t doing it.

“I’d really like to be making films and creating other media,” I would tell people, “but that’s expensive and hard to get into, so I can’t really do it.”

And almost everybody would nod his or her head in understanding, especially if I explained the huge amounts of investment required to make feature films.

Other people were often eager to tell me what I ought to do with my life. It was always something practical and reasonable, often closely related to something that person had done. I was slowly sucked into being practical — which has made me miserable with my life today.

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I was already in love with her voice, so I would have done anything to stay on the phone with her that day. I didn’t care what we talked about. I just didn’t want her to hang up the phone.

But that was more than five years ago.

I find myself in an unusual part of town right now. It’s somewhere I rarely come anymore. But as I exited I-59 and turned down a street that felt quite seedy, I wasn’t thinking about why I had come or even about the dangerous neighborhood. I was having a flashback to the last time I was here.

And now I‘m sitting in a darkened parking lot. Waves of emotions are washing over me as I experience what I felt that day. If I close my eyes, I can imagine she’s still on the phone with me right now — just as she was that day.

I was in love with her. I was in love with her voice. Everything about her intoxicated me. And I would have done anything for that call to last for the rest of my life.

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I am angry.

It’s hard for me to admit that. I’ve written in the recent past — here and here — about the reasons for this, so I’m not going to waste time explaining the reasons again.

I spent most of my 45-minute drive home from the office on the phone. As I locked the office door, I made a phone call that I thought would take 60 seconds, but it dragged on and on. As I finally pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant for dinner, I realized that my muscles were tight and my jaw was clenched.

I felt incredibly angry. It wasn’t anger about anything that had just happened. It was more long-repressed anger seeping out. As I turned the car off and sat in the fading twilight for a few moments, I felt a rush of irrational anger and misery.

I wanted to explode. I wanted to cry. I wanted to angrily scream out to ask somebody why life doesn’t work the way I was taught it was supposed to.

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