Where did my younger self go? Where can I go to get him back?

By David McElroy · September 27, 2013

If you met your child self from years ago, how well would you like him or her? I’ve been thinking with surprise lately that I’d like my younger self quite a bit. The big question in my mind is how I stopped being him.

A few weeks ago, someone reminded me in a vivid way of certain things from my childhood. Those images have stayed in my mind and I’ve been thinking a lot about who I was back then. Thursday afternoon, I started thinking about some of the funny and unusual things I did as a child and teen. The more I thought, the more I smiled. My way of “playing” wasn’t normal. Here are the things I thought of.

I remembered starting a bank for neighborhood children when I was about 11 years old. We hadn’t been living in this community near Birmingham for very long, but I decided I would take deposits from kids around me. I had a box with a lock, and I typed tiny slips of paper noting how much each was worth. I don’t remember exactly what the business plan was, so I’m unclear how I intended to make money, but I remember kids trading those little pieces of paper instead of money for a few weeks. (The whole bank went bust when my sisters demanded all of their money back. I guess it was a run on the bank.)

I thought about a radio relay service that I was going to set up when I was about 9 years old between Anniston, Ala., and Meridian, Miss. I lived in Anniston and I had a friend in Meridian, where I had lived for about a year and a half before. I knew that it was expensive to make long distance calls, so I had found a cheap radio with a limited range. My scheme was to set up repeating relays between the cities to deal with the limited range of the signal. And somehow, I was going to sell cheap communication time between the cities so that people could avoid expensive long distance charges. Yes, it made sense when I was 9.

I remembered my plan to set up an inexpensive telephone service for an area of several blocks between my house and the house of a friend who lived adjacent to the junior high school in Jasper, Ala., where I lived at the time. A tornado had come through town and destroyed a lot of office buildings. That meant that a lot of telephone equipment was being thrown away. I collected all of it that I could and figured out how it worked. I didn’t have central office switching equipment, but I figured out crude workarounds to make a simple system work. My friend and I started laying wire between our houses, but we were stymied by the little matter of how to run our wires over streets without climbing the utility poles. I gave up and just wired my own house with extra extensions everywhere. (I also rigged a bugging device to record all calls on the line. I didn’t really want to hear anything in particular; I just wanted to see if I could do it.)

I remembered the time when I lived in Meridian and I was the leader of one of two small rival neighborhood clubs of boys. We were the nerdy boys. They were the popular boys. (Our club was called United States Spy and Investigation Enterprises. Seriously. Their club was called Flash. We both even had flags.) We had a makeshift “clubhouse” made from leaning plywood and strips of canvas. They had a much nicer place that someone had built. (Their fathers, maybe? I don’t recall.) The popular boys didn’t like the nerdy boys, and they threatened us. This was the summer between third and fourth grade, so I have no idea how serious such threats could have been. I warned them to leave us alone, but they kept pushing. So one day, I burned their clubhouse down when they weren’t around — and they never bothered us again. (I hope the statute of limitations has run out.)

While I was in high school, I led the youth group at my church. I was also editor of my school newspaper for my senior year. It would take too long to explain the details, but I spent the year driving that paper to record paid circulation and record ad sales, in addition to advances in technology and product quality that were sophisticated for a group of kids. The final issue of the year was a blowout 48-page paper in four sections with full color on all the sections, back in the day when nobody used full color. On graduation night, when others were setting off for graduation trips to Florida, I was managing a staff that was selling lots of papers at the ceremony. I didn’t care about a vacation. I was interested in sales numbers.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. I was a strange and nerdy child, far more serious than others my age. I had crazy schemes and I was completely confident that I could achieve them. I was smart and driven and more than a little bit arrogant. But I wanted to do things that I thought were big and exciting. I read biographies of inventors and leaders and businessmen. I wanted to do things great enough to be written about one day.

But something happened along the way. I didn’t realize it, but when I was in college, I started suffering from a tiny benign growth on my pituitary gland that changed my hormonal balance. I didn’t know anything was wrong. I just knew that I suddenly lost the drive that I’d always had. It wasn’t that I no longer cared about achieving things. It was merely that I didn’t seem to have the energy or the drive. I had no idea why. I also started gaining weight.

I still did pretty well at times. I was promoted to managing editor of a small daily newspaper a few weeks before my 22nd birthday. I was the youngest managing editor of a daily in the country at the time. I went on to start several businesses in my 20s, including a couple of newspapers and a typesetting company. But I would sometimes sit at my desk in frustration, realizing that something was wrong. I knew what to do, but I didn’t have the energy. All of my companies failed.

Eventually, the medical problem was diagnosed and managed. I expected to return to the way I used to be. Some things changed. For instance, my personality became more like the way it had been years before. I really wanted to return to the ambitious plans that I’d once had.

But something was missing. I had spent so many years feeling unable to be that person anymore that the confidence never returned. It never really has. I’ve never been able to get that “young David” back. I’d like to be more like him today.

My life hasn’t been terrible. I had a nice run in newspapers. Then I had another nice run in politics. But now I’m trying again to find the spark of confidence — or is it even arrogant self-belief? — to propel me toward doing the sorts of crazy things I once did.

I need a partner. (I always did projects better when I had a partner, even if he did almost nothing.) I need to get my mind focused on what kind of enterprise I really want to create. And I need to have that absolute belief again that I can go hunting for Moby Dick in a rowboat and take tartar sauce along — because I’m so confident that I’ll succeed.

How do you recapture what you once were? When I look inside, I know that parts of that kid are still there. Can I bring the rest back? I’m not sure, but I am sure that I like him.

I really like him a lot.

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I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

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