Superheroes

I have a coffee mug with the words "I write. What is your super power?" on it's side. I was thinking about those words as I was drinking my morning coffee at the kitchen table watching the sun rise out the kitchen window.

As a writer, I try to hold COMPASSION and JUSTICE in a kind of tension. I write of the world as it is, and as such I try to suffer with it, I try to climb into its skin and walk around in it, as Atticus Finch counseled us to do in To Kill A Mockingbird, I try to simply become more human. I also write of the world as it could be, and as such I try to bring justice to the world, I try to put myself in spaces of injustice and fight against it with stories, I try to simply build a more human world.

If I am a superhero, and if I have a super power, it is because I can walk around in other people's shoes, I can become their laughter, I can become their tears. I knew I had this gift from the time I began knowing, and I spend my days nurturing it. Maybe it is the greatest superpower in our time, for the greatest evil seems to be our inability to have empathy for each other. Tears drop from eyes and I tenderly kiss them and taste the salt in them, and in this moment I am me - who I am and who I want to be.

It is in the tenderness and tasting that I write - of the immigrant child, the homeless neighbor, the lonely migrant, the LGBTQ person, the frightened man, the human being. And in this moment I am me - who I am and who I want to be.

This is my super power. This is why I am a superhero.