Not Your Superhero Part 1:

Please Stop Being Amazed That I Crossed the Street

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I’ve been thinking a lot about superheroes lately.

Not just the capes, the superpowers, and the inevitable destruction of half a major metropolitan area during the final battle. I’ve been thinking about their origin stories.

Because here’s the thing about superheroes: nobody gets a superpower and immediately says, “Well, this is convenient!”

There’s usually a whole lot of trauma involved.

Peter Parker gets bitten by a radioactive spider. Suddenly, he’s stronger, faster, and able to climb walls. Sounds fantastic, right?

Except he’s also a teenager whose entire life has been turned upside down, and he has to figure out what the heck is happening to him.

And then there’s the symbiote situation, which initially seems like an upgrade until Peter realizes that maybe having more power isn’t necessarily better.

Rogue can absorb another person’s powers with a touch.

Sounds pretty awesome.

Unless you happen to want to hug somebody you love.

She can’t.

Touch—the most ordinary, human thing in the world—can become dangerous.

Nightcrawler can teleport. He is incredibly agile and has abilities most people would consider amazing.

He is also blue, covered in fur, has a tail, and has spent much of his life being treated as something frightening or monstrous because of the way he looks. His struggles with shame, faith, and his own perceived “wrongness” are a huge part of his story.

Daredevil loses his sight and develops extraordinary senses. His blindness isn’t magically “fixed”; he experiences the world differently. 

In the Batman franchise, Barbara Gordon becomes Oracle after a devastating injury changes her life. Instead of her story ending because she is now a wheelchair user, she develops an entirely different way of being a superhero.

The Thing in Fantastic Four is practically indestructible.

He’s also trapped in a body made of orange rock.

And Batman?

Batman doesn’t even get a superpower.

He gets trauma.

His parents are murdered in front of him, and a lifetime of grief, anger, and obsession follows.

Apparently, the superhero starter kit is:

Congratulations! You have incredible abilities!

Also, your life is going to be complicated as hell.

And honestly, that’s the part of superhero stories I find interesting.

The superpower doesn’t erase the difficulty.

Sometimes the thing that makes someone extraordinary is also the thing that makes their life harder.

But there’s another thing superheroes have in common.

People tend to focus on what they can do.

Not necessarily on who they are.

And that got me thinking about disability.

Because disabled people get this treatment all the time.

Justin – who is my executive assistant – and I joke about how amazing it apparently is when a blind person crosses the street.

Seriously.

A blind person approaches an intersection.

They listen for traffic.

They use orientation and mobility skills.

They determine when it is safe to cross.

They cross the street.

And somewhere, a sighted person is watching this unfold thinking:

“OH MY GOD. THAT IS AMAZING.”

Meanwhile, the blind person is thinking:

“I was going to Kroger.”

It’s not that the person didn’t accomplish something. They did.

But the amazement often comes from a very different place:

“I could never do that.”

And that’s the problem.

You don’t have to believe you could do something in order to respect the person who does it.

You don’t have to understand how someone navigates the world to recognize that they are capable of navigating it.

And you certainly don’t have to turn someone’s everyday life into a superhero origin story.

Disabled people aren’t superheroes.

We’re people.

Some of us are exceptionally talented.

Some of us are stubborn as hell.

Some of us are funny.

Some of us are annoying.

Some of us are incredibly competent.

Some of us are having a really terrible day.

Some of us are all of those things before lunch.

Disability can require adaptation, creativity, problem-solving, persistence, and skills that other people may never have had to develop.

Those things are real.

They are worth recognizing.

But there’s a difference between recognizing someone’s skills and turning those skills into evidence that they are somehow superhuman.

Because once you put somebody on a pedestal, you’ve also made it harder for them to be human.

Superheroes get to screw up.

Peter Parker makes questionable decisions.

Wolverine has some serious anger-management issues.

Rogue gets angry.

The X-Men disagree with each other constantly.

Batman probably needs several therapists and is one bad day away from being court-ordered into treatment.

Nobody looks at Wolverine and says, “I’m so inspired that you managed to get out of bed today.”

And he’s often a selfish, bitter jerk.

Maybe we could do the same thing for disabled people.

Maybe you don’t need to be amazed that we crossed the street.

Maybe you can just be impressed that we got where we were going.

Or don’t be impressed at all.

Maybe we were just going to Kroger.

And maybe that’s the real superpower:

being allowed to be an ordinary person.

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