David McElroy

Do you want to stop me from trying something new? Just make me face the reality that my first attempt won’t be perfect.

Do you want to stop me from getting better at something new I’ve tried? Just show me how much better everybody else’s work is. Show me the best example of that work from someone else and then wait while a voice whispers, “See? You’re not good enough.”

I’m a quitter. The twin demons named Fear and Shame stand guard over my dreams. They taunt me. As long as I stick to things I find easy, they leave me alone. But when I look at my dreams again — or if I dare to start working toward one of those dreams — they spring into action.

“You’re not good enough,” Shame hisses. “Look how good all these other people are. They’ll laugh at your incompetence.”

“You’re going to do all this work and find out you have no talent,” Fear whispers. “You’re better off doing what you already know how to do. It might not make any money, but you’re good at it — so you won’t be embarrassed.”

I listen to these demons — and then I quietly find a thousand reasons not to do the things I want to do. It happened again this week.

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I sometimes remember the future very clearly.

That notion violates everything we think we know about the world. We remember the past. We imagine the future. Everybody knows that.

But, still. Something in my heart remembers the future — and the truth of that future is often more clear to me — more real — than my memories of the past.

There are two parts of me and it’s hard to say which is the real me. One part of me has his feet firmly planted in the material reality around me. The other part sees and feels and experiences something beyond all that — but it’s vague and murky, as though I’m seeing it through a heavy fog.

The first part of me is grounded in “common sense” and in the material reality which we grow up learning about. But the second part of me — the part of me which consistently sees the woman and our home and my children — is grounded somewhere between spooky mysticism and the mysteries of quantum mechanics.

“Why do we remember the past, but not the future?” physicist Stephen Hawking once asked.

Quantum mechanics suggests that the future already exists. Common sense says that’s nonsense. My heart can’t argue about physics, but I long for a future I’ve already seen.

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It was just a fleeting part of a dream, but it’s been bothering me for the last couple of days. It had been a happy dream until that moment. I dreamed that I was married and had a family, although I don’t know who my wife was. We were all at home. Everything was normal and good.

Then all of a sudden, I realized that my wife was disappointed in me — and I felt ashamed of myself.

She wasn’t even in the room, but I somehow felt her disapproval. I had let her down. I was fat, even though she had expected me to get into better shape. I wasn’t as successful as she wanted me to be. I wasn’t as ambitious as she wanted me to be. I wasn’t who she hoped I would be.

In that moment, I feared that I could never be good enough for her. And then I woke up.

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