David McElroy

Almost anyone can type. Some of those people can write and think clearly enough to shape a coherent story. A tiny fraction of those do it well enough to get a good novel published.

Anyone can splash paint onto a canvas. Even if you have no talent for illustration or composition or brush strokes, you can make painted shapes and call it modern art. A tiny fraction of those can convince critics that their work should be sold in galleries.

It’s true for every field of art. With the tools that are readily available today, almost anyone can make a creative project — a film, a sculpture, a photograph, a book. A few of those will be really good.

It requires talent and work and patience and luck to produce something that most people would see as art. It’s incredibly difficult. It’s something many people spend a lifetime trying to do.

But as difficult as those things are, it’s even harder to earn a living today with art.

For some people, it’s simply because their work isn’t good enough. But even many people who produce excellent work can no longer make a living from the art they most want to create.

The world has changed in ways that make things very hard for creative people today. I don’t like the changes. I’ve ranted about those changes and been angry about them, as have many creators.

But the media world of the past is gone. It’s not coming back. For me, that means I have to change. It’s time for me to stop fighting reality.

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When I was a little boy, I was obsessed with an unusual question. I wanted to know why I was here — and why I was part of my family.

Most children ask a lot of “why” questions. I did, too. But the question that fascinated me most wasn’t why the sky was blue or why birds could fly. I wanted to know what I was supposed to be — and to answer that, I first had to answer a more fundamental question: Why was I here?

Somehow, when I was about 3 years old, I reached a conclusion. I don’t remember how I arrived there, but I became convinced that I was part of my family because I was there to help.

One day, my parents were unloading groceries from the car. While they were carrying bags into the house, I quietly went outside, got a huge box of Tide detergent out of the trunk and tried to carry it inside myself.

The box was much too heavy, so I found my little red wagon. By the time my mother discovered what I was doing and took a picture, I was struggling to load the box into the wagon so I could pull it to the house. I managed to drag it only a few feet before giving up in tears.

Looking back, I don’t think that’s just a cute story about an overly ambitious little boy.

Nobody had asked me to help. Nobody had assigned me a chore. My behavior flowed naturally from the answer I had reached to a single question. I believed I was there to help, so helping simply seemed like the obvious thing to do.

I’ve been thinking lately that this may be true of all of us. The quality of our lives depends less on the answers we’ve found than on which questions we’ve chosen to organize our lives around.

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I remember the moment when my first real love died.

The relationship had been on life support for about a year. I had wanted out, but I couldn’t bring myself to say so. And then one autumn afternoon, everything ended. Even though I had wanted it to end, I felt a pain unlike anything I had ever felt. This must be a mistake. But it was over.

Years later, another love ended. There had been other loves along the way — smaller loves, maybe —  but this one felt more powerful and more real than anything I’d ever felt. Things got complicated. I backed out of marrying her. She moved on. Things got messy. The pain was even more intense than the losses that had come before.

I thought there would never be anyone else. Unexpectedly, there was. It was someone I had casually known in the past. She sent me a message out of the blue. Before long, I had fallen head over heels for her. She said she loved me and wanted to marry me.

And then — suddenly — she didn’t want a future with me. There was no explanation. Not then. Not ever.

I was left feeling all alone. Missing someone I couldn’t have. More hurt than I had ever been in my life.

But despite the pain — and despite the pain that had come with the end of every love so far — all I wanted was to fall into the grips of love again.

Against all of my experience, I believed that love could finally come and stay. For me.

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