David McElroy

I dreamed I was in a burning office building. Flames were everywhere, but people around me acted as though nothing was wrong. They went about their work. They laughed and talked. There were children there, too. I remember a little girl in particular. Everybody seemed oblivious to the danger that was obvious to me.

I tried to get the attention of the people near me and I pointed to the flames. Nobody cared. I wanted to run out of the building to save myself, but I knew I should save as many people as I could — because people would be dying in mere minutes.

As the dream ended, I was conflicted and angry. Nobody was listening. I wanted to save them, but they wouldn’t see the danger. I couldn’t decide whether to keep trying to save them or just get out to save myself instead.

I woke up in a sweat, but I knew what the dream meant. In the last few weeks, I’ve been conflicted about the work I’m doing on the YouTube channel called DavidMcElroy.TV. I finished editing the first 10 episodes a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to post them.

I feel as though I’m casting myself in the role of an expert or a guru. Even a would-be hero. Or maybe an apocalyptic prophet from the Hebrew Bible, the sort who stumbles out of the wilderness to warn the people of hidden destruction just ahead.

And when I see myself that way — and when I realize how this plays into old egotistical desires of mine to be a leader and a hero — I want to stop everything.

It makes me want to stop talking publicly — to shut all of my media efforts down completely — and to disappear into comfortable obscurity without being concerned with what’s about to happen to others. With a few simple actions, I could shut down this site and delete my remaining social media footprint.

I don’t want to be anybody’s guru or hero or harbinger of doom. Is it time for me to disappear instead?

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I have trouble starting over. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a game, a business venture, a relationship or a job. If I find things going poorly, I want to walk away. I feel humiliated. I want to quit.

Starting over would be an admission of failure, that I hadn’t been good enough. It’s easier to just move on to something new, because I’m uncomfortable with the messiness of fixing something that’s gone wrong.

When I was a student at the University of Alabama, I had been dating a bright and beautiful nursing student for a few months. Then we had a disagreement about something. It was minor — and I don’t recall the details — but we stopped talking. I wanted to continue the relationship, but I wasn’t willing to go to her and say, “How can we work this out?”

I didn’t see this woman for several years. I had moved on and married someone else. Then I was in Tuscaloosa one day and ran into her. We talked about what had happened.

“I knew I was wrong,” she told me, “but I didn’t know how to admit that and reconcile things with you. I kept hoping you would call me again and we could start over, but since you didn’t, I figured you didn’t care and I gave up on us.”

I learned the truth too late. We had both wanted to reconcile, but neither one of us knew how to open the door and then start over.

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When I was a little boy, the wait for Christmas each year seemed to take forever. Even in the summer — or even after school had started back in the fall — the weeks until Christmas went by at a snail’s pace.

If you can remember being a child — and dreaming about what you might get for Christmas or whatever holiday your family celebrated — you probably remember feeling the same way.

When you’re 5 years old, the time until another Christmas represents 20 percent of the time you’ve been alive. That might as well have been forever back then.

When I thought about what I would be in the future — when I got old enough to start having oversized ambitions for myself — my life seemed to stretch to eternity. My parents had lived half their lives. My grandparents have lived most of theirs. But I had forever to become what I was meant to be.

For the first time in my life, I feel a clock ticking. I no longer have forever. I have decades left in which I can live and love, but the years are flying by. The time from one Christmas to the next is now a blur.

I still have plenty of time, but it’s no longer forever. And for the first time in my life, I’m feeling a fear I’ve never known. What if I don’t find the love and the life I’ve always needed?

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