David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

Going back to fundamentals gets me closer to the quality I want

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When I started photography, I was an ignorant 17-year-old who had just fired a photographer on the school newspaper. I was the editor and I knew I wasn’t getting the photos I wanted, so I picked up a camera — for the first time in my life — and started taking photos myself.

The school paper had a cheap Yashika camera that was fully manual. We had nothing but a 50mm lens. I had nobody to teach me. My early pictures were  lousy, but I slowly got better.

By the time I was working at a small daily newspaper as a part-time reporter/photographer during college, I was pretty decent. My new camera was mostly manual by today’s standards. It was a Minolta XG-7 which had a light meter and some primitive program modes, but I had to manually set everything. Focus was manual, of course.

The only lens I had was a normal 50mm lens. But I still managed to get some of the best shots of my life, especially after I discovered I had a talent for shooting basketball games.

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Leave your dead past behind; that’s not where you’re going

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Late Sunday night, I had the old Beatles song “Yesterday” on my mind because it came up in discussion yesterday. As the lyrics floated through my mind, I found myself realizing — almost with surprise — that I can’t identify with the song’s longing for something better from the past.

I’m not exactly happy with where I am now. There are certainly periods in the past when I had it better — felt more love and had more money. All of that is true.

But I long for the future, not for yesterday.

I believe in tomorrow being what I’ve been looking for. I believe that the best days lie ahead of me. I believe there’s love waiting for me. I believe there is success beyond what I’ve dared to dream. And I think it’s a good thing that those better times are in the future, not in the past.

Yesterday is dead.

I’m focused today on the things I need to do to make tomorrow what I want it to be.

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I’m trying to silence inner critic who says I ought to be perfect

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For years, I wasn’t even conscious of the voice, but it was always there.

“You should have seen that!”

Every time I made an error — of any kind — the voice told me what I “should have” seen or done or not done. The voice knew everything I should have done. Its standard was perfection.

If I missed a question on a test in high school, the voice was outraged. If it was a complicated algebra problem and I overlooked a tiny key detail in the setup — causing me to get the answer wrong — the voice was angry. It wasn’t a chance to learn where pitfalls were. It was a reason to criticize myself, even if I outscored everyone else on the test, because I hadn’t been perfect.

When I played a game — whether it was racquetball or a word game — every mistake was a reason for outrage.

“Why didn’t you see that? What’s wrong with you?!”

When I used to play racquetball, I ruined several rackets in frustration with myself. I was never angry with an opponent. Always with myself. And without realizing it, I slowly taught myself that my very human mistakes meant I was irredeemably broken.

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