When the Superhero is No Longer

As I watched for the second time “Arrow”, a DC series on Netflix last night, I’d realized something. Last night I’d begun re-watching the seventh season. It reminded me not only do the cast of characters age——but the characters they play, evolve as they also have aged. This morning like last night, the show was heavy on my mind the minute I woke up.

I’d been cramming the second round of viewing the series, watching three shows a night. However, even during that second viewing, I know to turn down the volume when the fights breakout to not scare our two pet bunnies. Yes, they too enjoy watching television. The two elder bunnies are what we have left of our pets now. One will be 90 years old in 33 days and the other will turn 102.5 on Friday, Valentine’s Day. The one thing that appears to function the best on both our bunnies is their hearing.

As I watch them age, the 90-year-old bunny still seems youthful. She did a wild ‘Happy-Bunny ‘  dance just the other day, as the older of the two laid under our recliner one room away napping. Conversely, our 102.5-year-old bunny is partially lame and is on pain meds that cost me nearly $80 per month. She’s blind, her spatial relations are quite questionable—too, every day there is more cleaning her up, along with more cleaning up after her. I check her body every day for any skin irritations. She’s so dossal now, that I now need no assistance in clipping her nails nor checking for any matting build-up that could happen in less than a week or even in two days.

What all this extra bunny care reminds me of, is the fatigue I’ve had at different times of my life. There have been a variety of reasons for such levels of fatigue and sometimes pure exhaustion. But now I will say, fatigue. Exhaustion I equate with my twenty-four to thirty-six hours of training weeks including the 100 miles of running in those weeks while working a full-time business and raising our two children with my husband—as we shared household responsibilities like most solid middle-class families have in the past, where both parents were working full-time, plus.

I could list some of my most exhaustive years I could remember, like so: 1978, 1979, 1992, 1996, 1999, 2006, 2007, and 2017.  I realized that those years of exhaustion were key years of changes in my life. Burnout years were 1979, 1986, 1995, and 2017. Where I’d noticed it was partially from the athletics between the years from 1986-2019. Along with taking into account trauma from a crime in 1991 that had changed 75% of how I lived my life. During those years I’d put in an average of twenty-six hours per week of training, minimum fourteen hours per week to a maximum of thirty-six hours per week of training. Yes, for over a decade of that time I would get three hours sleep per night five of seven nights per week. I would say the most intense and amount of training were years 2004 through 2018.

Going back to watching “Arrow” in its seventh season. Last night I’d begun to watch for aging on the characters. I noticed the characters, Oliver Queen and Roy Harper showed signs of aging. It was the lines on the forehead of Oliver and Roy’s overall face that appeared to have aged.  Oliver’s son William was now shown as a grown man perhaps in his mid to late twenties. The last time the viewers saw William was as a tweener, perhaps just becoming a teenager in the sixth season.

The show had begun to flash to the future in its seventh season. As the series’ story ebbed and flowed, I noticed the past to present flashes, then the shift in the seventh season of present to future change up in the writing of the shows. As I’d pondered such changes this morning, I reckoned my near daily fatigue in the last eight years. I knew to credit some of it to athletic burnout. As I do still attempt to maintain a minimal to medium level of training an hour or more per day—I’d wondered was it age or the intensity throughout my life that had brought me to this juncture. There were many things I could factor in. Never mind any possibility in my reckoning with age.

I’d begun to realize that most superheroes didn’t appear to last at an older age. They’d either died in their last fight or leave to some far-off country after curing the world of its ills that were put upon them to accomplish. The superhero doesn’t usually “…rust-out or fade-away…”. And not always do they ride off into the sunset either. There is very little ease in the end for the superhero. They have feelings quite similar to the “Imposter Syndrome” feeling.

I reflected back last night, as my possible superhero days may be behind me. That’s if I ever could be a superhero. My final thoughts before bed were that I could at least imagine for a moment or two what life would be like if I could be a superhero. I thought about the conflict of having a family and being a superhero—which may not always end well. There would be much conflict—at least while being married and raising children. How could I explain a mysterious absence of me, especially when I despise lying and won’t lie. That would be a major hurdle for me.

In some sense like the Superhero that some of us want to be, including yours truly—we don’t get that chance to do something so bold or needed for the masses. Mostly because being a superhero is of a fictional nature. It’s an illusion in our psyche that we have hoped to be for the sake of saving humanity. In my mind, there is nothing better than such a noble cause.---Jody-Lynn Reicher