Every superpower is a disability
I have no evidence for saying this. It’s just something that came to me a few years ago: every superpower is really a disability.
I used to think that I had a superpower, you see, which was my ability to turn off my feelings, and stay calm and unruffled when other people were freaking out. People would genuinely be impressed by this: “you seem so serene, it’s like you’re in the eye of the storm”. I accepted this praise and I believed it. I put it down to all those years meditating and being spiritual.
Later, it began to dawn on me that there was a cost to having my superpower.
Someone asked me to talk about what I felt grateful for. And I found that I didn’t feel any gratitude towards anyone or anything. This was baffling. What did I feel? I actually didn’t know, but I began to have a suspicion that I was resentful. Underneath the cloak of superhero serenity, I was angry. If I could have got in touch with that feeling, I would have said “Who are you to sit there telling me about your problems, expecting me to be so understanding? What about my fucking problems?”
This was before I became a counsellor, you understand.
But I was very far from being ready to let those angry feelings come out, and I suppressed them, and this fighting against myself made me feel low. I became depressed. Eventually I decided to go and see a counsellor. Over the next ten weeks I discovered some of the truth about my anger, let some of it out, and then decided I’d had enough counselling. I was feeling a bit better. I thought I was better. In fact I was fine! FINE*.
I was still a big believer in my superpower of calm serenity. There was a lot of darkness in me that I couldn’t bear, and so I’d learned not to feel its pain. The problem with this ‘not feeling’, though, is that we can’t pick and choose what not to feel. Either you feel everything, or you feel nothing. No pain, no joy. No anger, no gratitude. My superpower left me incapable of feeling what I wanted, but I got round that by focusing on what other people wanted. That kind of thing goes down particularly well in spiritual circles.
In Ancient Greece, the name given to superhuman power was hubris, which means extreme arrogance and self-importance. And every hubris has within it the seeds of its own destruction, its Nemesis. Think of Icarus flying too close to the sun, or of Narcissus, punished by Nemesis for falling in love with his own reflection. The goddess Nemesis is the child of Nyx, the primordial goddess of night, feared even by Zeus. I think that this is a mythological representation of the truth that whatever makes us shine brightest is that which deepens our shadow.
As my superpower got stronger and brighter, my inability to feel got deeper and darker; and when, eventually, I decided I couldn’t avoid feeling any more, it was like being on a little boat being drawn inexorably into a Niagara of emotions. Overnight, I went from being someone that could feel very little, to someone who could do nothing but feel. It was dreadful.
At some point, an eternity or about four years later, I bobbed back up to the surface. I didn’t have a superpower any more. I could feel things, and I was, if not OK with it, then at least better with it. I was reminded of the saying that an optimist is someone who knows how bad things are, while a pessimist is someone who is still finding out. I’d touched bottom, and it was bad, but I felt so much better.
I’m interested to know what your superpower was or is: what is it that secretly made you feel special? And did it turn out not to be a blessing, but a curse?
* F.I.N.E. – Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional
