Every time I take a peek into my childhood, I recollect being glued to the idiot box. My experiences of embracing heroes, learning more about them, and idolizing them was very similar to that of Junot Diaz. In his article in The NewYorker, “Watching Spider-Man in Santo Domingo,” he states that his earliest exposure to television got him to believe that his father was not able to be with him because he was fighting crime on the streets of New York City as Spider-Man. As a kid addicted to television, I can completely empathize with the situation Diaz was in.
My childhood involved a great deal of watching cartoons, information channels, and reading comics. These were my road to slip away from realities and fantasize about my life as a superhero. I believed I would fight crimes alongside Phantom and save the world from evil. Eventually, my focus shifted from being Phantom’s female counterpart to becoming a hero myself. I worked towards developing my own superhero powers, making my own costumes, and practising my lines when a villain would come up to me. Due to my innate fascination with machines, I also designed my own imaginary flying car that would help me fight crime. I believed that batman’s Batmobile was useless when compared to my flying car.
As I was growing up, the quality of the shows also decreased. I met a lot of people in life and realized that the villains were amongst us. We had to be the hero in our life and ward of these villains. I then understood that the villains outside didn’t matter. The ones that actually affected us were our fears, and conflicts within us that deprived us of moving forward in life. Television, according to me, had a great deal of influence for me to get into the overthinking, fantasizing, and derogatory mode in life.
Life got stressful and the number of hours I watched television reduced drastically. The realities of life came gushing to me just as Diaz’s life when he met his father in person. Realities in school, at home, with friends, and amongst family members became difficult to fathom because of my addiction to television. Just as Diaz realized that his father was not the “good” hero that he had imagined, I also realized that phantom wasn’t real, I couldn’t become invisible, and that a hero need not be a guy in a costume secretly trying to fight evil. I then developed my belief that heroes are in fact just ordinary people trying to impact people’s lives in a positive way.
I would conclude by stating a line my mother always told me, “Debunk stereotypes, learn the hard way, and realize that life is tough. When you get tougher, you turn into an example for people. You conquer the world and you’re the hero.”
