Tuesday, September 10, 2013

The Possibility of Heroes


I can’t recall the exact place, the exact minute, or just exactly what it was that I was doing at the time. But I can tell you that it’s a sensation, not a memory. Growing up, you want nothing more than to be like everybody else. You see the book cover, not what the pages behind it are filled with. Maybe at one point you wanted to look like Barbie. Or maybe you wanted to be the strongest person in the world, like you thought your dad was. But that’s the catch: it’s only a thought. When you’re young you have the innocence of childhood. The moment in life where your parents, siblings, family, will always stick their necks out for you. They’ll hold your hand, be your best friend, do whatever it takes to see you grow your wings. But once you’ve grown your wings, the wind sweeps you off your feet and carries you away. Yes, you still label those people as your family, but they no longer hold your hand. They are not the same shells of the people you grew up with and thought you knew. Falling into adulthood lets you flip the front cover of that book. And you finally find out why you can’t judge a book by it’s cover; because the cover is so misleading. The hero figure that held you while you cried about the monsters under your bed is now the same one who pushes you into uncomfortable situations with hopes that you’ll learn from it. The older sibling that protected you from the thunder and lightning now makes fun of you in front of their friends.
To me it’s not a memory, but a sensation of waking up one day and realizing you don’t have any heroes and you don’t look up to anybody anymore. It’s the feeling you get when you wake up from sleeping. When the sky is half awake and half asleep, just like you. Confusion sets in as you realize you have no memory of how long it’s been since you first fell asleep. I came up in a time with no heroes because I cracked the shell of childhood. Heroes are a reflection in a pond to me. Sometimes you can see them, but in my life they never seem to be real. You can admire someone’s qualities, characteristics, looks, but is there really a single person you want to be exactly like? People screw up so many times. No one is perfect and you need to be able to except that. But I would rather know that I am in control, independant, and making my own mistakes, than copying someone else’ s. We learn from other’s mistakes’, but we don’t take note until they happen to us directly. If we try, we can avoid the world’s mistakes. I want to be me. I don’t want to sit around and be like someone else, or sit around and wait for someone to come save me. Because when you sit around and wait, you have no proof that someone will show up, and you have no proof that following their path will be the right choice. I came up in a time with no heroes because I choose to rely on myself and not believe in a chance that I’m sick of having to fix.





"A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because her trust is not on the branch but on her own wings."

--Unknown

No comments:

Post a Comment