too alarming now to talk about, take your pictures down and shake it out… truth or consequence, say it aloud, use that evidence, race it around… there goes my hero, watch him as he goes… there goes my hero, he’s ordinary…
I woke up this morning with this song in my head. It’s not uncommon for that to happen to me, it’s just usually annoying songs I hear on TikTok. Anyway, it’s been running through my head since I opened my eyes, and it got me thinking about heroes. Who they are and what they mean to us. I tried really hard to think if I had a few, or even just one. And honestly, I couldn’t think of any.
Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines the word HERO as:
- A mythological or legendary figure often of divine decent endowed with great strength or ability
- An illustrious warrior
- A person admired for achievements and noble qualities
- One who shows great courage
Typing out these definitions made it perfectly clear to me that I am correct – I do not have a hero.
I’m not trying to be rude or obnoxious. I just don’t currently have the ability to idealize someone so much that I would define them as a “hero”. Do I know people who do courageous and awesome shit? Absolutely! But I guess maybe my own personal view of what a hero is may actually be a little skewed.
I feel like as a society we do this quite often. We take a word and strip it of it’s meaning because it sounds cool. Like people calling mundane shit “EPIC”. No, that’s not what epic means. And I have no idea why, all of a sudden, I’m so concerned about the definitions of words, seeing as though vocabulary wasn’t really my thing, so I’m not sure where this is coming from. But like, why do we do that? I guess what’s happening right now is that I’ve just figured out that this is something that really fucking bothers me. People taking the meaning out of words just to make something seem better than it is.
I can’t say that this post might not have a bitter agenda behind it. Because I’m writing all of this out and all I can think about is how the term hero is often used in conjunction with the word father. And I’ve been pretty clear on this blog since the beginning, my father is not my hero. That doesn’t make him a bad guy, it’s just not what he is to me. And when I see the word hero in relation to a parent, especially father, it really rubs me the wrong way. It’s not that I don’t think it’s possible for a parent to be a hero, it’s just that I’m coming from the opposite end of the spectrum. I didn’t have that, so I don’t know, and I’m bitter about it sometimes.
I was talking to my husband about my relationship with my stepfather. He passed away when I was 20 years old and I have spent the last 21 years not knowing what could have been. In my brain I have made him out to be this magical, mystical, heroic man who saved me from myself, but the truth is that all I know is what I had for the 5 years he was in my life. Did he change my blueprint? One thousand percent. I can’t imagine what kind of awful human I would have become without him. But the story stops at 20 for me. And I have spent the last 21 years writing a story that might not really have happened if he was alive. Could it have happened? Maybe. But once again, I will never know. And we do that a lot with the people who have passed. We are given the gift of being able to write their story to fit our agenda.
If you asked me 20 years ago if my stepfather was my hero, I probably would have jumped on the “my daddy is my hero” train. He was brave until the moment he died. But he was still a human being. He and I still had moments of being stubborn and hardheaded about the things we believed in. Would he even like the person I am now? Who knows? And I think that being given that gift of writing out how life would go if they were still here is probably the best coping mechanism you can get while you’re grieving a huge loss and forced to continue living without them. His death changed my life. It changed who I was, who I was becoming and who I am now. I have spent years of my life missing him, resenting him, wishing he was here to see certain things, etc. It’s a lifetime of never knowing and just coping the best way we know how.
The last couple of years I have been trying really hard to get a handle on what’s real. It’s been difficult trying to organize my thoughts and not feel, or sound, like a crazy person. A lot of shit swirls around in my gray matter daily and the ultimate goal is to get some sort of routine in motion that involves writing it out so it stops swirling endlessly. In this quest for some sanity, I found that I notice a lot of weird shit about what we do to to make ourselves feel like our lives aren’t just one endless ride on a hamster wheel. We sprinkle in words like hero and epic to make things and people seem like the best when they’re actually just regular. It’s how we cope. It’s not a bad way to cope with whatever bad shit you’re dealing with, but it’s not real. It puts an immense amount of pressure on the expectation and then falls short on the reality.
Wouldn’t it be crazy if the vast majority of people in your life just said what something actually was instead of gassing it up to be something it wasn’t? For example: “EPIC DAY AT THE PARK!” could just be “we had a good day at the park today, my kid had a meltdown, but what’s new?” And then everyone relates, they laugh, realize they’re not alone in their struggle and then they move on. Everything doesn’t have to be epic. Not everyone in your life is a hero. And that’s ok. I just feel like if we took the time to feel the feelings and then move on, there wouldn’t be this endless, unspoken competition of my life is better than yours. Couldn’t we all just collectively agree that life is good and not take it for granted?
When you put unrealistic titles on regular people, it just puts unnecessary pressure on them. Calling someone your hero might not be what they need to hear. Is it nice to hear? Of course! But what if that person doesn’t feel like a hero and now you’ve dropped this title on them and they have no idea what to do with it? You’re giving that person zero room for error and setting yourself up for possible disappointment. You’ve put them in a place where they can do no wrong so when they do, it’s crushing for you and for them. Allowing everything and everyone to be ordinary leaves a lot of room for something or someone extraordinary to come along and absolutely blow your mind.
I’m not trying to put a damper on your life and how you choose to live it. I promise. I’m just trying so hard to hang on to what’s real in this life. I feel like we are exposed to so many things just for “the show” and it’s making us feel like the life we are living isn’t enough. If it’s all you can handle right now, then it’s enough. I hope something in this post resonated with you. And if it didn’t, thanks for reading anyway…
kudos, my hero, leaving all the mess… you know my hero, the one that’s on… there goes my hero, watch him as he goes… there goes my hero, he’s ordinary…
Song name: MY HERO/ Artist: Foo Fighters/ Year: 2006
TALKING ON EGGSHELLS 