The Super Hero and Failman

I’ve contemplated writing this now for a couple of months, if not my entire life. Even now, the fear of what I am about to write envelops me like a prickly blanket, its warmth compelling me not to do it. But I have been wanting to answer the questions that many who have met me have asked either out loud to others or quietly deep within their subconscious in that little space that sometimes escapes them as a part of their thoughts. What is that question?

“What is with that guy?”

For those who know me and read this, and are wondering what I am talking about, just know that I am about to give you a tour of the entryway into my psyche in the best way that I know how, which is in written form. For those who don’t know me and read this, I am about to give you a tour into the psyche of a tortured soul in hopes that at least one of you will use this as a lesson to avoid this trip to Hotel California, and work your ass off to find the love of yourself within yourself, and ask for the needed assistance to live a happier life.

I am pretty sure that this decision to pour a little of myself onto the Internet, a place where nothing will ever disappear, might have some detrimental effects, like making it harder for me to run for president against Kanye West, another mental person born on my birthday, but hey, it is what it is.

So here we go…

Have you ever considered what is could really be like to be a super hero? To be a person that has the power to save the world from a force decidedly destined to destroy it because of reasons? A person that a country or a world has placed on a pedestal because of their gifts and abilities to do what no normal man or woman can? I have, and I must say it sucks. I say this because with each event that a super hero is thrown into where they must be the first and last thing that evil doers must defeat in order to complete their dastardly plans, there are two possibilities that could occur. The first, as I am sure is obvious since we are talking about a hero, is to succeed in their work and stop the evil and rise ever so much higher than they thought that they could ever rise in the eyes of the people that they save, and cement themselves a place in history as the one who defeated that which would have destroyed the world. The second, is to fail at the task, become the wall broken by the evil that wanted to accomplish a dark goal, and forever be remembered in history as the hero that failed. That kind of pressure would have to be unbelievably more to bear than the fate of the world’s existence. I imagine that would be why a super hero is so… well… super. They manage to handle that kind of pressure and not let it affect their work as they go and save the world. They can keep the fact that they are on the pedestal of success that the people of the world that they are attempting to save put them on in the back of their head, and not let it slow them down. They keep going because someone depends on them to, and they will continue to keep going because someone depends on them to.

So how does this fit in with my story? Well, I have for many years seen myself as the latter of the super hero possibilities. I am a failure.

Ok… so cue the record scratch as the music suddenly stops and everyone who knows me goes, “Wait, what? You, a failure? But you have a decent job that you worked hard to get into. A wonderful wife and child who love the hell out of you. You are a good friend and highly dependable. You are helping your niece out. You are a good man.”

I would respond to that with, “Yeah I guess that you are right about all that. It doesn’t change the fact that I am an utter failure, and I hate myself. I look in the mirror every day, and see a man who is not worthy of your time, not worthy of your friendship and your gracious comments. I see a man who has yet to EARN those things.” We would continue to debate this fact back and forth until eventually someone would say that you need to see a counselor (which I have) or just agree to disagree.

Then, the question would come that would explain I am writing this particular post. “What caused you to become this way?”

When you are a child, one of the first things that you want to do as you learn and grow, is you want to please whoever fills the role of parent in your life. You want to give them everything that they want because it makes them not only feel good, but you as well because you are the reason they feel good. You want to be the drug that they become addicted to. Now, most of the time I would imagine that kids don’t realize this and they eventually grow out of it, or something happens to where that focus never stays around in the kids’ mind. I would speculate that is especially the case in families that could be considered “normal.” When I was a child, I realized at a very young age that this need to please my parents was the best gift that I could give to my parents. I could be the drug that would allow my mom to slip away for just a moment, even if it was fleeting, to a world that was happy and good. You see, my childhood was filled with slamming doors and broken things and violence that should only exist in the movies. There was a lot of hatred and pain in the people that I looked up to as my parental units, and I took it on as my job to fill the void of happiness by being the thing that could make people happy. I became, in a sense, my parent’s super hero.

My tasks in this role were clear. I would do good in school so that I could make them happy about the fact that I was learning and completing school, something my dad never did. I would comfort my mom silently by letting her hold me after my dad decided to be violent and angry at her. I would give my dad someone to teach dominoes to and the subtle art of catching cat fish so that he could feel important in someone’s life. I was their joy, their saving grace, in a world that was dark and destructive. And so, just as the populous of a world just saved by a super hero would do, my parents placed me on a pedestal.

I do not believe that they meant to do it intentionally, but it happened. However, I now had a bar that I could not fall below. When I did, I felt it in the spankings and reprimands that I received over the years as I transformed from child to teen to man. Those failures, as I imagine would any super hero, stuck with me more than all the successes that I had achieved. I would imagine that the reason for that is because they were few and far between, and major changes that are few like this are the ones that stick the most in our lives. They become defining points or milestones in our lives. It is why we can remember things like when we got our first car or when our grandpa died more than what we ate on January 22, 1999 for dinner (or if you are WAY to young to know that date, what you ate when you were 2 years old on that date).

Whatever the reason, I began to define my life in these failures because I did not want to fill my life with them. I wanted to avoid them at all costs, just as Superman tried to avoid kryptonite. I did not want these failures to be my weakness. I had to be perfect. Perfection was my goal. I could keep my parents happy and fulfilled on this drug of me if I could be perfect. So I pursued perfection in everything that I did. Unfortunately, that pursuit created a dangerous feedback loop. The more I chased perfection, the more powerful my failures affects were on my life when they occurred. Eventually, as the failures began to mount over the years of experiences that I obtained, I began to hate myself. I began to hate the fact that I cannot achieve this perfection that I needed to achieve to make my parents happy, and my sister happy when she came along, and eventually my friends happy. I became my own arch nemesis, Failman we will call him/me.

As I got older, the battle between me and Failman only intensified. He was always there to bring me down to my lowest low when I would reach my highest high. He would stare back at me in every reflective surface that I would come across taunting me and reminding me that failure was always around the corner, and soon he would strike and knock me off the pedestal that I now felt that I must maintain for all my friends and family. And since he looked, sounded, and acted like me, Failman would easily hold the pedestal as I fell and no one would know better.

There were a few times where Failman almost completely destroyed me. I remember in high school coming home and looking at the knives in the butcher block in my parent’s kitchen, thinking, “I could end this fight now and destroy us both, if I just take one of those knives… No, NO! Too many people depend on me to be a source of good in their world. I must soldier on.” Then when I was 19 walking home from work from Garden of the Gods Road and Centennial to Tejon and Fillmore (streets in Colorado Springs for those who don’t know what I am talking about) because my car was in the shop and I didn’t want to bother my roommates at the time with the fact that I needed to be picked up, I stopped on Fillmore bridge and looked down at the oncoming traffic driving north on the interstate that ran underneath. Once again, I thought about ending the battle between me and Failman, this time with the use of physics by testing which had more force, a gravity controlled fall or a semi-truck moving at a speed of 70+ miles per hour. Once again, I remembered my creedo of being a source of light and happiness in the world for all those who met me, being the stopper of death for those who I could be a stopper for, and being as dependable as I could for those who needed someone to be dependable. So, as I am sure you can tell, I did not continue with that plan either. However, had there been no one in my life that depended on me, no one that I felt would miss me or wonder what happened to me the next day, I know that I would have continued with my physics experiment. I have no doubt of it.

And so, the fight between me and Failman goes on. I add to the failed relationships, failed jobs, failed education attempts, missed opportunities, failed attempts at being a writer and businessman, and the fact that I cannot afford to lose my current job because I will never be hired in a comparable position anywhere else because of the credentials that I do not have, giving Failman more and more power. I add the fact that I nearly ruined a situation dear to me because I chose to try to save two people from themselves only to fail at saving them to the list of failures that I have, giving me reason to be absolutely disgusted with myself, to a point that now I have no self-love to give.

So here you are. This concludes the tour of the foyer of my mind palace and some of the rooms in the central wing of the space. Now you know what exists behind the smiles and the laughter and the jokes that you hear from me. You now know why I do not appear on Facebook very often or try to hang out with my friends on the weekends. This is the truth, at least some of it. I am sure that someone will still say, “But you don’t have it that bad. You could be homeless or have cancer or something worse.” To that I would advise you that I am homeless in my mind. In my mind, the tour that I just gave you is of a palace that is no longer mine. It belongs to Failman. I sleep on the grounds in the elements, a shell of my former glory, still trying to be the super hero to the world that I was for my parents so long ago. I am riddled with my own form of cancer, the chase of perfection. While those people are right, that I am physically still capable of so much more, mentally I come up a little short.

They say that those who can do, and those who can’t teach (unless you are a teacher by profession, because you are totally doing, like a badass real super hero everyday). So here I am… teaching, because at the moment I am far beyond saving or doing. Please understand that this is not a cry for help. This is an insight into my struggles that I have kept hidden from the world for a long time, and I hope this little confessional can be used to teach the following:

1. If you feel like suicide is the answer, then you are rushing to end your life. You should slow down, and take a moment to think about the people that you are in the lives of, because your choice to end the fight between you and your own personal Failman once and for all will have a negative affect on more than just you. Death tends to do that.

2. If you are still young enough to realize that, if lived properly, you have more than half of your life left and you hate yourself, now is a really good time to try to figure out how to love yourself. Go back to the beginning, and try to find out where the hate started, and write down why you should forgive yourself. If you don’t know, find people to tell you when they saw a change in you, or talk to a professional to help you through it.

3. If you are a parent, be mindful of how you celebrate your child’s successes, especially if you are in a situation similar to mine when I was a child. If you are not careful, that child will see themselves as your super hero, and will start to walk the same path as I did. Ensure that your child does not see only the pain and hurt that you have in your life. We humans have this need to find balance in everything, and kids are pretty good at recognizing imbalance right off the bat instinctively.

4. Let your failures teach you, not define you. Be defined by the lessons that you learn from your greatest successes and greatest failures.

5. Keep a list of your successes and a list of your failures. When you hit that point where it seems like a string of failures are just piling up, having a list of successes will remind you of the good that you did do, and that this is just a hard point.

6. Be A.B.L.E. Actively Be Learning Everyday.

If you made it to this point, then thank you for reading, and please share. It also means that I actually posted it, and the Internet has my life forever. If you are curious for more personal insights, let me know.