Guest Blog: Heroic Fantasy by Jason Thomas Howl
Captain Awesome
I have this pathetic fantasy about saving a little boy’s life. Like we’re on the busy curb, and the kid’s ball bounces into the street or something, and he goes chasing after it, and there’s a car speeding by that doesn’t see him, and I dash out and grab the kid, and shield him with my body, and wrap up into a ball, and the car hits me, hits us, and we go off the windshield, and go flying into the air, and bounce on the pavement. And there you have it.
I fall limp like a pile of laundry. Cracked ribs. A spiral fracture of the skull maybe. But the kid is okay. Hysterical, two parents sprint in and grab the little boy up to find of course there’s not a scratch on him. Traffic stops and people get out of their cars. Cellphones materialize in the palms of passersby to flood the 911 lines while I bleed unconcious on the pavement. That kind of thing.
The pathetic part of the fantasy is that every person who I want some kind of approval from: high school friends that are more successful than me (Jimmy Rollins of the Philadelphia Phillies), coworkers who don’t respect me (you Tom Wilcox in accounts!), women. Mostly women. All the women I know and like are there and they witness this selfless, noble, spontaneous disregard for my own physical safety.
Why? Well, saving a little kid in front of anyone you’ve ever wanted to impress would probably forever relieve you of the burden of having to impress them ever again. Wanting to be witty and charming and liked by people, but instead being mostly awkward and clumsy and uncomfortable around them is fucking exhausting. I just want to save a little kid’s life and forever be known as Captain Awesome and not have to impress anyone ever again. Done and done. I’m The Kid Saver. My mettle isn’t up for debate. Profuse apologies for physio-social and socio-conversational stammerings are now a thing of the past so far as my person is concerned. Freedom is never having to say you’re sorry. True. But an even greater freedom exists in not having to try and get what’s on the inside outside. This is what purple hearts and tattoo tears are for.
When I tried describing to a friend what my anxiety was like, I told her: You know that trapdoor plunge at the end of every roller coaster? That plunge that dislocates intestines and fans weightless fear through your chest and throat, then subsides the instant the rails come to their senses and bring you back parallel with the earth? I walk around feeling that way all the time, like I’m falling. Except that unlike with a roller coaster, there’s no flat ground waiting to smooth me back out. It’s just a bottomless drop.
It’s almost impossible to operate like anything resembling “the real you” when you feel this way. Which is, of course, all you really want — to “be yourself”. Instead you stutter, or flub your words, say random, disappointingly stupid things — or worse — rehearsed, hopelessly-timed formulations that make people look at you like there’s a giant sea monkey where your face should be.
And this just makes the plunge that much steeper. The drop, faster.
It starts to eat into your nerves. Coil your arms and legs. Make you tremble. Make your eyes go raw.
And you have to somehow function this way, out there in the world.
You end up thinking like a dog who only wants to crawl underneath something and die out of reach of any arm or gaze. But there’s nowhere to crawl to, except deep inside your own head. To your fantasy asylum.
And that’s where Captain Awesome comes in.
You have no idea how good that feels to write.
There’s two principals at work here. One is the Flannery O’Connor idea of:
“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”
The other, a banal Joseph Campbell quote about psychoanalysis:
“When people find out what it is that’s ticking in them they get straightened out.”
Writing isn’t a substitute for therapy (as in talking to a trained professional about your seldom-revealed insides), but it can be a therapeutic instrument if you play it that way. Which cringes me as I type because it sounds like some kind of yuppified secular prayer. But then again, so do fruit salads. That doesn’t mean they aren’t good for you.
Here’s a slightly more broad-shouldered, enterprising way to look at it: Think of your notebook as being a refinery. At one end, the crude oil (in my case anxiety, in your case, maybe something else) goes in, then there’s some smoke and fire, and out the other end comes a useful, precious fuel.
Emotion –> Language –> Ownership.
And ownership feels good. Comforting fantasies, by comparison, are tiny rented things.
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