What’s your superpower?
I truly believe everyone has a weird little superpower that other people can’t understand and that we don’t usually document. I believe this because after studying neurobiology I’m awed by the power of our chemical minds.
When you THINK, you physically move little synapses and cells around, and little chemicals move back and forth that you can’t see, so like inside your skull things are physically moving because of your thought. You’re inwardly telekinetic. Your brain can even release histamine, which affects your stomach and immune system, and serotonin, which affects your blood pressure! And those thoughts give off measurable electric pulses into your skull–electricity that we can MEASURE with an EEG–and that goes off into the air. You’re constantly generating this electric field–what happens when we all generate the same field, is a question I got from a Wiccan I was bothering back in high school, and it’s an excellent question.
My superpower is that I’m an unbridled empath. I experience physical pain when seeing other people in pain, and when I’m in large groups of people I feel all kinds of weird feelings from all kinds of different directions. You’d think this would make me good at reading social situations: it does make me an amazing salesperson when I’m selling something I care about, and it’s why I’m always so bleeding heart about my patients (and why my patients love me). But in all honesty it makes me terrible at normal social interaction because it incites in me a constant state of panic. Of “why am I feeling what I’m feeling,” of second guessing myself and overanalyzing and trying to project my own feelings on other people and trying to establish control because I’m terrified of other people feeling badly so I’ll over-exert myself to control situations and over-talk and just over-DO so that I can control everyone’s feelings. Because I’m trying to avoid pain, and trying to force a state of equilibrium, this can cause me to CAUSE pain. Which sends me into a negative spiral, because causing pain hurts me, so I freak out more, and so on and so forth. I need people to feel happy, so I become a happiness vampire.
In other words, my superpower is clouded by pride, and fear. When used appropriately, it’s truly amazing what I can do with my feelings! I’ve been able to help people no one else can “feel,” and I’ve been able to read rooms well enough to double the finances of causes I cared about. But I have to rely on God to deal with my pride, and my fear, or I cannot handle the constant stream of input. Sometimes, I just have to close off from the stream, which is why in some very large settings you’ll see me eating off by myself, or hiding in my books. Even after a good day at the hospital, I become really tired after interacting with everyone’s pain, and I go home so sore all over my body, and I have to rely on God to heal me at the end of each day.
What is your superpower, and how does it cripple and empower you? How are you using it to change the world?
Feel free to share in the comments below.
