David McElroy

Do you know what it feels like to be certain that nothing can stop you?

It’s a moment of winning. Time slows down. It’s the sudden feeling that all is right with your world. It’s the certainty that you could do anything in that instant. That nothing could stop you. That you are in such a state of perfect harmony with something in the universe that God is pleased with you.

I live for those moments. I crave those experiences just as much as a junkie needs a hit of his drug. In those rare moments of seeming perfection, I feel as though I am good enough — and that I can do anything.

I felt that way one Saturday morning 15 years ago. I was at a film festival and my short film was about to be shown to an audience for the very first time. It was a large crowd, maybe 500 or so, I suppose. I was nervous. The audience had seemed bored during the films before it. Maybe this was a tough crowd.

And then my film started.

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I was trying to tell a friend about my film idea when I stumbled upon the right title. I casually said something about attempting to tell “the truth about my father” when it struck both of us that I had just spoken the right title.

“The Truth About My Father”

That would be the name of the non-fiction book I would write and then it would be the name of a very fictionalized comedy version that I would make afterward. Why did such a strange tale need to be told as a comedy? I didn’t know then and I still don’t know, but I know it’s a dark comedy.

That was years ago. Ever since then, I’ve struggled to figure out how to make the story work as a film script. Redrawing my father as an exaggerated form of his eccentric self was easy, but the story centered around a son learning the hidden truth about his father. And I figured something out this week.

The story is boring — and it doesn’t work — unless I dig into my own flaws and trace where the worst part of me came from. To tell the truth about my father, I have to dig into — and expose — the worst parts of myself.

And that’s scary.

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It was after midnight when someone tagged me on Facebook. I checked to see what it was.

“Came across this going through some old photos from about 5 years ago,” this person wrote as his caption next to big words on a picture. “Words of wisdom from David McElroy.”

I don’t remember writing the words, but it sounds like my voice, so I’m sure I did. As I read the words, I agreed with them, but I found myself painfully aware that I haven’t always lived up to them.

“You can’t force someone to believe you are worth making a priority,” I wrote, apparently about five years ago. “If you try, you will end up bitter, hurt and angry. If a person doesn’t value you enough to make you a priority, it doesn’t matter what he or she says — even if the words are, ’I love you.’ Love is lived out through priorities and actions, not words and wishes. If you wait and beg to become someone’s priority, you’re not showing how much you love someone else. You’re showing how little you value yourself.”

I remember what it feels like to be a woman’s priority.

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