David McElroy

What if you knew a secret that the rest of the world needed to know? What if you could change lives with this knowledge? Would you share it with others?

Of course you would. If you saw a tornado coming, any normal person would warn others. If you knew of any danger which others couldn’t yet see, you would almost certainly do everything in your power to raise an alarm. You would tell others what was coming — and you’d warn them to escape the danger.

But what if others didn’t want to hear your warning? What if you knew that others wouldn’t listen? What if you realized they wouldn’t take you seriously — that they might even call you crazy?

If you had that knowledge in your mind — but you found that people around you wouldn’t listen — would you doubt yourself? Would you wonder whether you’re crazy? Would you throw your hands up in frustration and maintain a sullen silence — even though the coming storm seemed painfully obvious to you?

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There was nothing especially noteworthy about the dream. I was married and we had a couple of children. I’ve had variations of this dream for years. It always takes place at a home which I don’t actually know, although the house differs at times.

For almost seven years, it was always the same woman when I had such dreams, at least in the ones in which I recognized someone. At other times, I couldn’t say who she had been. But it was always either this particular woman or a generic unknown woman. Until last weekend.

For the first time in a long time, the wife in my dream was a woman I used to know pretty well. Marie was a tall and beautiful Czech woman who lives in Prague. She was still in grad school when I first met her online years ago. She was smart and we had similar values.

I still remember the first time she called me on the phone as she rode a train home from her university. I was attracted to her and she was attracted to me.

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People are going to hurt us. That’s one of the certainties of life.

People we trust will betray us. People we love will hurt us. When we are vulnerable, some people will harshly judge us, often misunderstanding what we’ve allowed them to see inside us.

Once you’ve been betrayed and hurt often enough, it’s easy to feel numb. It’s natural to feel distrustful and to want to shut others out. But one of the central realities of life is that we need other people. Whether we like it or not, we have to go on loving and trusting and being vulnerable.

For some of us, this is one of the central contradictions of life. We know what our experience has shown us, but we also know that the love and connection and trust which we so desperately need can’t be found without reaching out and hoping that everything will be different this time.

This has been the central struggle of my life — whether to trust and love in the ways that I need or to run away and hide as a misanthropic hermit.

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