David McElroy

I hadn’t seen Amy for months and she seemed excited to see me.

“I finally figured it out,” she called to me as soon as I approached her table. “There was nothing wrong with him. I was just scared because he loved me so much. I was afraid he might abandon me if I didn’t run away first.”

Anyone who heard us in the restaurant tonight would have assumed we knew each other well to be sharing such a discussion, but we’re just “pizza buddies.” We both like the same place and we sometimes talk since we both tend to come alone.

Amy is in her mid 20s. She’s in graduate school. She’s smart, funny and quirky. She’s also quite attractive. One of the things we’ve talked about most, though, is our mutual need to find love that will stay. The last couple of times I had seen her, we had talked almost exclusively about her confusing relationship with a man from England.

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Those of you who have been with me since this site started more than seven years ago know that I used to work in politics. I made a lot of money as a successful political consultant years ago, but my conscience eventually forced me to get out — for reasons I’ve explained before.

For the last five or six years, I’ve been trying to figure out what’s next for me — and it’s been a serious financial struggle. I had done well in the past as a newspaper editor and publisher, but newspapers are dying. Politics was now out for me, too. So what made sense? I knew some things I wanted in the long term, but I haven’t had any idea how to get there. Now it’s time to let you know what I’ve settled on — for those who are interested.

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve struggled with the need to be perfect.

I didn’t always call it that, though. Others accused me of being a perfectionist and I was honestly confused by the label. My life was anything but perfect, so how could anyone accuse me of that?

Eventually, I came to understand that my life was horribly imperfect — in an unhealthy way — because I felt such guilt about not being perfect. I allowed major chunks of my life to become wrecks simply because I was so afraid of not being perfect that something in me went in the opposite direction. If I couldn’t be perfect at something, I didn’t do it. The perverse inner logic seemed to be that if I didn’t even try, I hadn’t failed. I simply hadn’t cared enough to try.

I understand now where that guilt about being imperfect came from, but that’s not my concern here. I’m more interested in something I’ve seen in myself lately — some indications that maybe I’m starting to get past this lifelong struggle.

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