3 Childhood Superpowers That Aren't So Super Anymore
When you're a tiny child, you're basically awesome. Everything you do is funny as shit. All your friends are rad. Hi-C rules. Ghostbusters. You also have a fascination with being temporarily not like yourself. Being in a certain condition. Pretend. Freeze tag. Army. In Kindergarten I used to play Pregnant. It was fucked up. For a minute, it was totally sweet to have braces or a broken arm. The idea of being Alterna-You is, I think, why we have superheroes in comics. They're part real and part magic. My three used to be all magic and now they're way too real.
1.) Super Sleep.
I could never sleep as a kid, but I could pretend better than anyone. Nursery school, to me, was Intro to Method Acting. Us little'uns were awarded stickers for our lunch boxes for every nap time we slept through and when you're four, stickers are 100 dollar bills but even better because you're supposed to flaunt them and some of them smell like bananas. So I wanted those f'ing stickers and my inability to crash out wasn't gonna stop me from being a baby child pimp.
I had no problem faking sleep, but I had a really dramatic vision of what sleep looked like to an adult: I wouldn't. move. a muscle. I faked sleep so hard, I'd ignore an itch on the bottom of my foot and it would make me go insane. My mind would create repeating patterns to focus on. Really, I was teaching myself some Navy Seal shit where pain is in your mind. By the time I was in grade school I was basically a Delta Force Sleep Faker and I'd do it all the time. I'd fake sleep on car trips, family vacations, even places that would get me in trouble like school. I would turn my body off. It was forced meditation.
Cut to now. Super Sleep, at some point during puberty, turned into Super Real Sleep which is bad. Now whenever I close my eyes, I'm clinically dead. If I blink for too long, my pulse stops. When I close my eyes to rub them, I immediately start drooling and then someone is helping me off the ground all of the sudden. Super Sleep sucks because now it just means I'm a heavy ass sleeper and maybe a narcoleptic.
2.) Super Stress
This one is harder to explain, but when I was a wee baby, my mom told me I'd periodically have inexplicable rage. I'd ball up my fists and Hulk out to the point where I'd turn red and emit low frequency rumbles. Which sounds AMAZING to me. Just think of what I'd be like now if she actually encouraged that kind of behavior. There'd be me-shaped holes in the walls of banks. There'd be me-shaped holes in the sides of enemy subs (I'd rob banks until I was captured and started working for the gov).
I still Hulk out (internally) and after I unclench my fists and start inhaling again, I notice three more white hairs. Sucks.
Incidentally, this is kind of funny. Remind me when we're drinking to do Super Stress. I'll make fists and turn red and someone next to me (stand back) will pass out.
3.) Super Touch
When I was seven, I went to the hospital because I had an irregular heartbeat. It was mad fast and it wouldn't slow down. I could metabolize very quickly, run like crazy fast and it probably has something to do with me never sleeping. My retarded fast circulation meant I was always really warm. I over-heated quickly. Also, I got a LOT of bloody noses. Also, having a brain swimming in hot Super Blood sort of made me a genius.
For some reason when you're little, having a mid-level oddity (double-jointed, warm hands?) is totally cool, but if you have a simple weirdness (chubby, afro) or a really big one (diabetic and needs shots, allergic to everything) those are like, childhood-crushing, no-friend-having weirdo conditions. That could be an oversimplification or straight up wrong, but all I'm saying is I always got to be the Fire Ninja when we played Ninjas (if I touched you, you melted) and shit was generally on.
Super Touch now means I shake people's hands and they think I'm nervous. It's crippling. The ice in my drinks melts really quickly. Chicks who read crystals always think my hands are glowing purple and blue.