David McElroy

In February of 1973, a U.S. Air Force C-141A transport plane took off from Hanoi, Vietnam, headed toward the Philippines. As the wheels pulled off the ground, 40 jubilant men screamed with joy and relief.

They were the first planeload of nearly 600 American prisoners of war being released from North Vietnamese prisons, where they had been tortured and abused for much of the previous decade.

I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be one of those released prisoners, but it’s even harder to imagine how these men stayed sane — most for years — while they waited for the end. And since they were tortured and abused, they never knew whether they would survive to return home or if they would be killed instead.

I’ve been thinking today about those men because they offer some clues about how different people handle extreme stress. As I keep hearing people talk about how much stress everybody is under right now — with many locked at home in quarantine with their families — I’ve found myself thinking about ex-POW Jim Stockdale.

He said one thing separated those who thrived in captivity from those who were destroyed. It offers an important clue for us today.

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I pass the sign every day and never notice it.

Stop.

But as I walked through my neighborhood late Tuesday night, my eyes were suddenly drawn to the crooked red sign. It grabbed my attention and wouldn’t let go. This is what I had been struggling for the last week to say.

Stop!

I’ve been in a funk for days, but I haven’t known exactly what was going on. I’ve felt angry. I’ve felt resentful. I’ve felt something powerful that needed to come out. Whatever it was has been strong enough to make me keep to myself more than usual. I’ve been slow to respond to phone calls and emails and everything else.

Stop! Everything needs to stop!

As I stood there in the street with this bright red sign screaming at me, something suddenly clicked. It wasn’t rational. It was an angry and chaotic desire to raise my voice here on this silent midnight street and demand that the insane world stop what it’s doing. I needed everyone to hear me.

I need this chaos to stop.

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I had my first existential crisis long before I knew what the words meant.

I was a 5-year-old in kindergarten. I remember being alone at the front of our house on Holly Hill Drive in Atlanta. Something in my little brain was trying to figure out my place in the world.

I can’t tell you why. I doubt normal 5-year-olds have such thoughts, but I seriously pondered who I was and whether I mattered. The questions hung heavy on my little heart, because I desperately needed to matter.

Suddenly, I had an answer that somehow made sense to me. I was 5 years old — and there were five people in my family — so that coincidence had to mean something. I must be important.

All of my life, I’ve experienced one crisis of this sort after another. The specific questions change, but they all mean the same thing.

Do I matter? Do I matter to you? Do I belong with you? Are you my home? Can I trust you to love me?

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