A blessing or a curse?
I have a superpower. I think. It has been difficult to formulate it, even for myself, because it is, rather, a combination of strengths, which have felt like more like a deficit throughout my life.
All I know is that I have always felt different and never felt belonging. I changed schools, countries, continents, but have only found short fragments in time and space where I felt understood, accepted, and thriving in groups. Otherwise, I have mostly felt shy, inadequate, and out of place. Things I found fascinating, such as math, astrology, esoterics, singing, odd indie movies, other off-beat interests, others found bizarre, confusing, or boring. And, likewise, what many of my peers valued was never interesting to me. Even though I value comfort, including financial, I never understood how pursuit of material wealth could be at the very top of someone’s values hierarchy . Neither did I ever understand obsessions with fashion, celebrities, mutually agreed upon attractiveness, or pronouncements of “experts” and “authorities”. For me, popularity has always been more of a turn-off and a sign to walk the other way. Did I just not get it?
I always had this strong expectation of the world to be inherently good, poetic, beautiful, and fair. I valued ideas, mind, and spirit over matter and physical “reality”, tending to look slightly down on the latter. And I was criticized relentlessly for this — for being an Idealist. Was I detached from reality?
I also remember criticism for being “pathologically honest” and encouragement to “maybe lie a little from time to time” to achieve my goals. Somehow feeling right in myself has always been more important than any goal. Was I just not smart?
I first discovered this as a superpower in my young adult son, when I realized how pure, innocent, trusting, and naive he managed to stay well into his twenties, and how vulnerable this made him in the modern world. I wondered how he managed to grow up this way, without a cunning or dishonest gene in him. And then, reluctantly, I had to admit that he, likely, got at least some of this from me. I remember feeling so proud of him for this way of being and realizing that what I celebrated in him, I always considered a weakness in myself.
I think I am finally ready to accept my Idealism as a superpower and explore its gifts.