David McElroy

I knew Laura had a 6-year-old daughter, but I didn’t know the details. At dinner tonight, she told me her story.

“I never had any emotional connection with her father,” she said. “He’s a decent man and he tries to be in her life, but there was never any feeling between us. I was always just desperate for attention from a man — so I kept getting it however I could.”

Laura is 28 now. She’s a strikingly attractive blue-eyed blonde with a successful career in management. But she admitted to me tonight that she has always tried to find something that was missing from her life.

“When I was little, my daddy told me that I was a mistake,” she said. “I was an accident. They didn’t want me. My mom admitted it was true, but it mostly affected me with my dad, especially since he had another ‘accident’ a year after me with another woman. I craved his attention and couldn’t get enough to make me feel like I was loved. So when teen-age boys started wanting me, that was my way to feel loved. I kept looking for more and more — but I never found what I was looking for.”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my own pursuit of “more.” Laura’s ways of pursuing something more was different than my ways have been, but our motivations haven’t been so different — and this is more common in our society than any of us like to believe.

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What if you knew a secret that the rest of the world needed to know? What if you could change lives with this knowledge? Would you share it with others?

Of course you would. If you saw a tornado coming, any normal person would warn others. If you knew of any danger which others couldn’t yet see, you would almost certainly do everything in your power to raise an alarm. You would tell others what was coming — and you’d warn them to escape the danger.

But what if others didn’t want to hear your warning? What if you knew that others wouldn’t listen? What if you realized they wouldn’t take you seriously — that they might even call you crazy?

If you had that knowledge in your mind — but you found that people around you wouldn’t listen — would you doubt yourself? Would you wonder whether you’re crazy? Would you throw your hands up in frustration and maintain a sullen silence — even though the coming storm seemed painfully obvious to you?

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There are only five people who work every day in the building where my office is located. There are four people in the office next door and I’m the only person who’s in our real estate office every business day. Of the five people who work in the building, I’m the only one who hasn’t tested positive for COVID-19 at some point.

Because of changes in how we all work, our broker and agents rarely come into the office these days. I run operations for the company, though, so someone has to manage daily business in the quiet office. That’s me.

Several of our agents have tested positive for COVID-19 over the last few months. At least one of the tenants whose rentals I manage has had it. Another customer who came into the office told us a few days later that she had it. If I expand the circle to friends and family of people I know well, there are quite a few more. Some just disappear — and keep it quiet — for a few weeks so as not to alarm others.

A close friend told me that five men in her father’s Sunday school class have died from it over the last year.

I’m not an alarmist. I never sit around and worry about what I can’t control. But I’m finally starting to feel some fear for my personal safety. And after a year, I wonder how much longer this can go on without serious damage to our mental health.

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