On Being Spider-man

I am somebody who wanted to be a super-hero. Before the warning of “no capes!” I was tying my small blanket around my neck and jumping off the roof from well before I realized how freaking dangerous that was. You gotta fly before you can crawl, after all. Or something along those lines. 
 

When I was about seven, my mom asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and my answer was a firm “Spider-man.” I’d read the comics, I knew he existed, and that’s what I wanted to do. Dangerous? Sure, but that’s the price of doing good deeds. With great power comes great responsibility, and, while I didn’t know exactly what my super-power was, I was confident that in college I would be led into a huge nuclear reactor and get bitten by a spider or a fly or a mongoose or a wombat, and I would awaken with the power of a hundred spiders or flies or mong....mongeese? Mongooses? Whatever. Wombats. I wasn’t entirely sure about the logistics, I figured they’d let me know during freshmen orientation.  

So she had the sad task of informing me that this is not how the world works. Spider-man wasn’t real, he was written and drawn by a bunch of dudes in New York City (of course! Why hadn’t I realized that?) and it was all made up. 

To which I asked, “wait.... that’s their job? That’s what they get paid to do?” 

And with that, a plot was hatched.  

Seriously now, it’s been decades since that conversation, such a long space of time in which I’ve had to come to grips with my plans of being Spidey were dashed to pieces. And yet there’s still something of that infantile strategy playing itself out in my brain, even now. The plan has taken a few side roads, however. Music took center stage – literally – for a few years, as did acting and drawing and.... well, there were the dark times, where I actively worked for the Man and collected paychecks and formulated my 401k and investments and plotted out my healthcare and got a mortgage and paid off cars and credit cards and managed my diet and had a child and helped him grow up and.... somewhere along the line, that Spiderman costume got pushed into a box somewhere and it’s probably waaaaaayy too small for me now anyway, but..... 

One evening, after putting the child to bed, my wife noticed how sad and tired I was. The mask was clearly off, and she saw that something in my eyes just wasn’t there. And in the fit of exhaustion, I confessed that my creative brain was just... screaming out for attention. All my aspirations of swinging through the streets of Manhattan had not come to pass. I wasn’t even a Jedi. I was.... failure. I wasn’t living up to those dreams of helping people. I wasn’t being creative at all, and that was just about the worst thing I could have imagined. 

So, having just heard me make up a story to our child at bedtime (which happened every night – a new story every time), she shook her head. “So tell more stories. That’s your super power. Make stuff up, write it down and then you can see what becomes of it.” 

And she was right. I already had a story, about a young girl who is an angel of death and has to fight monsters to keep her town safe. She has a talking, flying cat named Mully who helps give her advice – when she listens to it – and a couple of friends who help her out along the way. A mentor named Ian, an old shaman to guide her through the world, and an enemy who wants to destroy them all. Also, she really loves wearing pretty dresses, no matter how much the fights ruin them. Just a simple little 11 year old girl who has to deal with bad stuff in order to help people have better lives.  

So I wrote that story. And another one. And a third. Fourth, fifth, and so on. I wrote other characters, and other stories. I wore bow ties and clever vests. I talked to kids about the characters and about finding their own super powers. I learned a lot along the way, made new friends, experienced new stories. And somehow, through it all, I made the most important discovery of all, one I wish desperately I could go back and whisper in the ear of that seven year old me: 

“You can be the dudes who tell the stories,” I would tell him, “but you are also Spider-man.”