"If everyone is special, then no one is." ~The Incredibles

So here's something that I've never told anyone before, ever. 

Not my ex-wife, not my best friends, not my counselor.  Nobody....

Alright, so it's not going to be that big of a deal--nothing earth-shatteringly revelatory--but it is something that I think reflects my thinking and expectations thru most of my life.  Truthfully I really haven't thought about this specific night for almost thirty years--not until the last six months or so.  Won't mean anything to anyone reading this, but I wanted to get it written down while I still remember it, and how it relates to how I've been feeling lately.

I was about ten years old; the only reason I know this is because I remember that the house I lived in when Return of the Jedi came out (this makes it 1983, for those non-nerds) is where the concept I'm getting to first hit me.

I had a bedroom that was supposed to be shared with my brother; it had been converted from the garage, and we had bunk beds built into the room, but never had the ladders to climb up.  It was kind of removed from the rest of the house, and most importantly we didn't have a TV in the room.  I didn't like to sleep out there, and very rarely did.  Not that these details makes any difference, except to set up the environment I was in.
We never lived in one house longer than a year from the time I was five until I was fourteen--I went to five different elementary schools by the fifth grade, and for the year or so we lived at this house I would sleep on the couch in the living room instead of out in the converted garage.  My family would go to bed around nine or ten every night, and I would lay awake on the couch, waiting for everyone to go to sleep so I could turn the TV on and watch Twilight Zone, listening to the occasional jet fly over the house on its path to Sky Harbor in Phoenix, and the clock we had tick its pendulum back and forth.  That clock in particular is a sound from my youth that I actually remember with fondness--you could really only hear it late at night when the world had finally settled, and I felt like I was the only one around to appreciate it.  There was an air of possibility in that almost-silence.

I don't know what got me thinking about this idea that night, maybe it was the girl I had a crush on at school, maybe I'd seen a movie.  Maybe I wanted to see the girl I had a crush on in a movie--who knows.  But I do remember very vividly what I was thinking.  I lay there on the couch, listening to the clock tic, tic, tic (it didn't make a tic-toc sound--it was a single note over and over again), and fantasized about rescuing a damsel in distress.

It was a very dramatic event to be sure--she would be my age, flying in a small jet over my house with her wealthy business-man father on their way back home from some very important trip and the engine would blow up.  I'd be lying on the couch, ready to fall asleep and I'd hear the explosion, so I'd run outside in my pajamas to see what was going on.  The girl, her father, and the pilot would all have jumped out of the plane to parachute to safety; only in the darkened sky she would get separated from the others, and would come down to land in my street without them.  But since I was the only one awake (the night was my home, and in my imagination even the neighbors were all asleep by ten), I would be outside to see her come to earth, and being the dashing ten-year-old hero I was, I would help her land without hurting herself and get out of the parachute before it entangled her in its fabric and chords.
We'd get inside, and I'd make her a hot chocolate in the microwave while she'd use our little yellow wall-phone to call her mom to let her know that she was safe (remember cell phones were a thing of science-fiction back then--even the big brick cell phones of the '80's were still far away).
And of course she was pretty, and grateful to me for helping her--we'd sit on my couch, wrapped in my blanket and drinking cups of hot chocolate while we waited for the fire department and her father to arrive.

We'd become best friends and be together forever after that.  Her dad would hire me out of high school (doing what I didn't know, and didn't care--as long as it wasn't raising animals for a living), and we'd live happily ever after.

                                                                          ****

So there are obviously some issues with all of that fantasy, and how it relates to the real world.  No doubt a psychologist would be able to dig into all sorts of things about me in that recollection.  Hell, my life in general could probably be someone's doctoral thesis in psychology.  

The notion of being the hero was born out of a life of reading books & watching movies where extraordinary things happen to ordinary people; men and women overcome insurmountable odds; the nice guy always gets the girl despite everything in the world being against him. 

I think maybe that fixing my mind from the age of ten on how I wanted my life to be filled with the amazing and fantastical had set me up for failure, so much so that I didn't realize it, or would forget when those extraordinary things did happen... when I did get the girl against the odds....

I watched a movie tonight (Special) where the lead character believed he had super powers, altho in the story he really didn't, and at the end he finally realizes it (sort of--watch the movie; I don't want to give spoilers).  Here's the quote as the main character narrates before the final scene:
"...the truth is, with so many billions and billions of people on the planet, most of us can't be unique or important in any meaningful way. We go to sleep, we wake up, we go to work, we eat, we spend time with friends, we watch TV, maybe we even fall in love, but we don't have any magical powers and we don't have any great battles to fight, no evil forces to defeat, and no mysterious men in suits chasing after us. We just have reality - and believing anything else is just... well, believing anything else is just crazy, isn't it?"

If my life were like a movie, I guess I'd be at that mid-point where the protagonist thought everything was good--until the antagonist killed the hero's partner or kidnapped his kids and he has to go and face the bad guy alone.  But I've never woken up being faster than a speeding bullet--more powerful than a locomotive--able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and my antagonists are only regret & loneliness. 
In the grandest scheme of things, that's pretty pathetic of me given the real battles people in this world--people even in my own city--face on a daily basis; not having a job or food to eat, fighting disease or prejudice that could take their lives or those of the ones they love.  I get that. 

I never wanted to be famous or rich--I just wanted to make a difference in people's lives, to have what I do actually matter, and that's where feel like I've failed myself, those around me, and the world in general.       

Deep inside my heart and soul, I'm still that boy lying awake at night, wanting to save the day, but not knowing how.....