David McElroy

After my junior year of college, I was offered a full-time job that was too good to turn down. The daily newspaper where I’d been working part-time for three years had a weekly newspaper in a smaller town about 15 miles away. The publisher of the smaller paper had taken another job and they needed a new managing editor, too.

Company management decided to take a big chance and offer the job to a brash 20-year-old who hadn’t even finished college.

I didn’t think much of my new boss. He had been the advertising director of the newspaper and had been promoted to publisher. After a couple of meetings with him right before I started the job, I was disdainful of him. Frankly, I thought I was too good for him. I was like an arrogant little child.

My new boss was named Jim. He was fat. He didn’t dress well. He didn’t present himself in an impressive way at all. He constantly smelled like a cigarette butt. He was so fat and out of shape that when I talked with him him on the phone, I would hear him wheezing a little, as though it was hard for him to take in enough air to support all of his weight.

I just saw him as a divorced loser who was alone in the world. How dare someone make him my boss?

As I started going out into the community as managing editor of the paper, I felt such a sense of shame about being associated with such a loser that I made it clear — quietly and subtly at first — how I felt about him. I was afraid of people thinking I was like him. I was embarrassed — more like humiliated — at the thought of anyone thinking he was really my superior.

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When I was 19 years old, I’d never seen any porn, but as a hormonal teen-ager with a normal sex drive, it sounded like a wonderful forbidden fruit. So I decided to buy a copy of Playboy to see what I had been missing.

I was nervous about it, but I went into a convenience store on Green Springs Highway in Birmingham and asked for a copy (since it was kept behind the counter). This was the first and only time I’ve ever bought any porn.

At first, I was amazed at what I saw. These were physically perfect women who were clearly ready to have sex with me — or pretty much anyone who would pay them, presumably. But after the initial rush of hormonal excitement died down, I quickly realized that the pictures didn’t arouse me in the same way that my own girlfriend did.

Let’s be honest. The women in the magazine were physically perfect in a way that my girlfriend couldn’t be. (I didn’t understand at the time that not even those women were actually physically perfect.) Physically, everything about them was just right. But I realized that I was far more attracted to my own girlfriend and to other women who I knew — women who couldn’t possibly be that “perfect.”

Why?

It didn’t take me long to learn something that I’ve never forgotten.

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I used to want to be placed onto a pedestal as a hero.

That might not be too surprising. After all, our culture is filled with tales of grandiose heroism that invite people — especially young men — to insert themselves into the stories as the hero. So what’s the big deal that I used to have a burning desire to be a hero?

It’s hard to explain and the full story isn’t pleasant. In fact, there are parts of the story I’m not yet ready to tell publicly. The time will come when I’ll talk about the ways that my life has been affected by the influence of narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder. Expect a book when the time is right. Until then, here’s what I’m ready to say.

After I moved recently, I started unpacking boxes and going through papers that hadn’t been touched in decades — some since my teen-age years. The things I found were fascinating and they forced me to see early evidence of emotional problems that I eventually had to deal with in counseling.

One of the most fascinating troves of notes and papers consisted of things I wrote over a three-year period starting when I was 13 years old. They dealt with my first serious crush on a girl.

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