David McElroy

My life isn’t what I want it to be. If I’m honest with myself, it never has been.

I have a narrative that I like to sell myself. It’s based on truth, but I can’t tell whether it’s the complete truth. I doubt any of our personal narratives are the complete truth. But here’s my persistent narrative.

I can see a time in my past when I was on the right track. It was a time when I was doing things I was proud of and I thought I had a great future. Then I got off track. I rebelled against something. Maybe it was against The Man. Maybe it was against my father. Maybe it was against culture telling me what I had to be.

I jumped off the treadmill leading to worldly success and I’ve been running away ever since. My narrative tells me that I’m just around the corner from finally succeeding — my own way — without doing what The Man said I had to do.

You have a narrative, too. It’s probably very different from mine. But we almost certainly share something important. We both know something which we desperately need — something we’ve always needed — and we keep finding all sorts of reasons not to reach out and accept whatever it is.

Keep Reading