ABC08a – Heroism on a schedule that works best for the hero
Warning: uh, I wrote this while high.
This is post #8 of my homebrew writing challenge, in which I aim to write a daily post (of at least 500 words) throughout April. It's April 9 when I write this; I missed a day. I could say that I wrote a couple posts since entry #7, or that I had been busy with friends, but I'm just going to own it and continue. In past writing challenges (e.g., Nanowrimo when it was a thing), I would give up if I fell off the horse, but in retrospect that's the worst thing to do. At stake is a whole month of writing that I prevent myself from engaging because I fell short once. What a loss!
Since this is my challenge, I'm ultimately accountable to myself. And I'm not going to give myself the chance to give up. I'll just write two entries today to get back on track. It's not shameful to have missed a day. Would I feel better if I gave up the rest of the month now? No!
So, where was I?
Words: ~1,800
In this entry I want to make an admission. I can afford to make it because I've kept myself anonymous on this blog. For about the last year, I've been wallowing in despair. For most of it I was functionally depressed, fulfilling my duties and feigning normalcy. But my mask has been cracking since the new year. Three hours ago: a good friend asked me how I was doing, and when I expressed I was going through a tough time, they said they could tell. And so I explained to them my feelings, which was cathartic, and so now I feel inclined to write in order to continue processing it. (Again, if I had given up after missing one day, I would have deprived myself from this search for clarity.)
The whole point of this blog is to help me figure life out. My past posts reveal common patterns. I want to simplify life, minimizing its noise and complexity so I can engage what's essential. I also want to find joy amidst it all; I've learned to rely less on success as a source of joy. I've interpreted my decreasing reliance on the external world as a form of ego death, to seek less validation in general.
I do all these things because I want my life to mean something. Not when others tell me that it's meaningful, but when I can feel alive. I am becoming my own judge and advocate. I want to feel like my own hero—like the person my childhood self needed.
Heroes in training
And on that note of heroes, I think of how figures like Superman or Batman or Naruto or Goku had periods of training when they were secluded from their world. Clark Kent spent years training between his upbringing in Smallville and his tenure in Metropolis. Bruce Wayne spent years traversing the world, learning skills in martial arts, being a detective, studying the psychology of criminals. Naruto spent a couple years away from Konoha with Jiraiya in a period of training. Goku on more than one occasion spent time away from earth to train with some god-like figure.
In all these narratives, the hero required this period of secluded training so they could develop the skills, dispositions, and capabilities to function as the hero that their respective audience recognizes.
Superman and Batman
As a function of narrative, though, their world still revolves around the hero. For Superman and Batman, we don't really hear about what Metropolis or Gotham City are like during their years in training. The audience is asked to understand that the heroes worked for their prowess previously, and that they could deal with the challenges of the now. How might an inexperienced Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne act if they knew what threatened their world, before they were capable of fighting back? Would they have committed to their training, or cut it short? (We see the latter with Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back.)
My point is, it seems pretty lucky that the threats faced by Superman and Batman came up after they were in town. (OK, in the case of Batman, he was driven to train because his parents were murdered by the socio-economic conditions of Gotham City, but are there any works that depict the city in his absence? I'd be interested in reading a story about Gotham City while Bruce is traversing the world. Give me the despair, give me the struggles of Commissioner Gordon and butler Alfred—two good men in the city still waiting for its deserved hero.)
Naruto and Goku
Elsewhere, we see that Naruto and Goku's training occurs during dramatic arcs (e.g., Pain's invasion of Konoha in Naruto and Frieza's search for the Dragonballs on Namek in Dragonball Z), and they appear when their antagonist has created just enough havoc. I appreciate the effort to show the suspense caused by the hero's absence (the tension produced in the audience is palpable: do we wish the hero to be with their allies in trouble, or to complete their training so that they can save the day?).
But again, the world revolves around the hero. The timing of suspense demands it. Imagine if Goku finished healing after Frieza took out Vegeta, Piccolo, Krillin, and Gohan. Or if Naruto transported back to Konoha in any other moment than the one he did. That's right, you cannot imagine it, because it trades realism for satisfaction. Their worlds do not stop for them, but they still defer to the hero in terms of good timing.
The danger of heroic tales
All of this to suggest that maybe such stories need a bit of caution for the audience. The warning isn't, "heroes do not exist and these stories are merely for your entertainment to feel hopeful about life." No, I think that's the pessimism created by the present moment talking. Such pessimism does not overrule history's vast regard for heroism, across various nations all over the globe. Heroes are necessary for humankind, to remind them of their best qualities.
No, the warning, I suggest is this: "heroes do exist, but their timing isn't perfect. This means they can and will fail based on circumstances, but such failures do not make them less of a hero. What makes them a hero does not depend on perfection."
(I wish I could have been succinct and poetic with my wording, but I want to be clear with what caution is advisable, especially in the face of pessimism created by the present moment.)
In the real world, I'm sure there are people with heroic qualities, like courage and a sense of justice. I'm also sure that the world doesn't revolve around their schedule (because as far as I can tell I'm not a non-playable character in my own life). This means they don't get the best moments to display the courage and other virtues. I have to admit that there are whole lives that are lived, without opportunities to be courageous. Or maybe opportunities were presented but they were turned down. (Which is worse? An opportunity that's missed, or one that never existed to begin with?)
If these conundrums exist for the best of humanity, then could it suggest that I don't need to be my best self 24/7? That I don't need to be a paragon for display?
In a way, I view my blogging to be a form of resistance training for life. (Resistance training builds strength, so I mean my writing is a form of exercise to build tolerance for life.) I feel I am in my phase of "being away from my world" (not geographically, but in the sense that my introspection has retreated myself from the world around me). Like all the aforementioned heroes, I am not in a state where I can help, because the implication is that I need to help myself right now. So that I may be recovered or strong enough to do a better job that I can offer in this moment.
Again, I wonder how Superman or Batman kept the faith during their training. Their goal was to protect and to defend justice, right? How did they know when that goal's long-term attainment was more important than attaining it in the present moment? How did they calculate when the training sufficed in preparing them for the whole endeavour of being a hero?
As for Naruto and Goku, the two with impeccable timing, I wonder: how did they come to recognize that rest or training was the most important thing to work on? This is a serious inquiry, for I live in a world in which rest is regarded with suspicion and distractions to training are abundant. Yet Naruto stayed the course with learning Sage mode and Goku stayed in the healing tank. Heroes are known for their valour, to be headstrong against adversity. How did the heroes here know when to turn away from immediate adversity for long-term gain?
My wondering is now wandering; let me just restate this is why heroic tales need a disclaimer. As much as I loved these tales growing up, across anime and books and movies and world myths, I was taught implicitly that heroism happens on a schedule that works best for the hero. The schedule isn't free of tragedies or mishaps, so no, I don't mean that the schedule works for the hero in terms of what's pleasant. I mean that the schedule works for the hero on the basis of narrative, in order to display the virtues of the hero in the best light. That's how they become heroes.
The risk in absorbing these stories is developing an expectation that one's life unfolds in the same way. That my living is built on a narrative that requires maximum impact. Since I don't know the story of my life, I can't sync my watch to it.
Thanks for reading if you made it this far. The preceding paragraphs were the output of a stream of consciousness (or as William Butler Yeats called his variant, "automatic writing"). Specifically after consuming a weed pill (but I digress). I want to preserve the raw images and ideas for later analysis; it's not content I want to editorialize, which I know means less comprehension.
But what I comprehend right now is a feeling of lightness. For in realizing that I don't have to expect my life to be a scheduled hero's journey, I feel less pressure. Namely, the pressure to have to satisfy some audience with the pacing and plotting of my life (!!!).
Instead, I'm appreciating that I can still be heroic and virtuous and all the secret yearnings of my soul, even when it feels like I'm falling short. Because the falling short comes from that pressure to live up to something that does not (because it cannot) exist (i.e., life-as-a-neatly-packaged-narrative). It is illusory (like falling short in a writing challenge, by missing a day).
And so what remains? My efforts, internally motivated. How those efforts are received by the external world are outside my control. The Stoics were really onto something here. The peace that comes from separating self from the external world (and its influence on one's soul) is the first step to reach the point when the self itself can be questioned (but let's save that for a future post).
I want to be really careful here and advise readers (and future me) not to take all of this as an excuse to not try. Don't get too comfortable with the reduced pressure: there is still a call to give to humankind—to give into one's own humanity. Answering this call is what heroes do.