There’s this thing about having super powers. I know what you’re thinking. Everyone thinks that way. I thought that way before too. My friends certainly think that way, and some of them still do, at least the ones who it hasn’t happened to. Not everyone gets super powers. In a perfect world the super powers would be distributed to everyone equally, like how the government doles out cheese in equal portions to all comers, both the hungry and the well-to-do receive their slice of the wedge. But super powers are not like that. I hate to be the one to tell you this in case you haven’t figure it out yet, but we don’t live in a perfect world. There’s nothing equal about people and there never was. I think about that a lot. How come I was one of the people who got the super powers? I haven’t come up with many answers so don’t look here for an explanation. It’s just something that gnaws away at me is all. It gnaws away at a lot of us.

Growing up I read the comic books and I saw the movies. I should have known what to expect. We all should have. The people with super powers either became superheroes or super villains. There isn’t much of a middle ground between the two. I don’t say this often when I talk about how the comic books or the movies thought about super powers, but it turns out that on this one point they were pretty much right on. When you can do stuff, what you can do becomes who you are. Your powers and how you use them are much more important than all the other parts of you, at least to the people around you. It’s hard to escape what defines you and what people expect from you.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to escape it, and I’m not one of those freedom lovers who regret their super powers and try to suppress them. I don’t care what they say, I don’t believe anybody truly has those types of feelings about their super powers, just like nobody regrets seeing or hearing or walking. You’re grateful for it, I’ve always been grateful for mine. It’s that once you have them you have to use them. There’s no way to get around it. And once you use your super powers—you see where I’m going with this? Once you use it you are defined by how you’ve used your super powers. For good or evil. Literally.

I said I had super powers and I also said that everyone with superpowers is either a superhero or a super villain. You’re probably wondering which bucket I fall into. I was never much for categories myself, but like I said, the super powers define you. When you’re a superhero, everyone thinks you’re super, you know? It’s not that I’m not super. It’s more that there are different levels of super, and I’m close to the bottom of the super ladder. I guess that helps give me perspective that some of the others don’t have. It certainly stopped the super powers from going to my head.

So, yeah, I’m not a super villain. I wouldn’t consider myself much of a hero, but when you help anyone that’s how they label you. If you saw me in the beginning you probably wouldn’t think there would be much that would stop the super powers from going to my head. I was full of it. My head was full of possibilities. One day I’m one of the ordinary ones, watching the people around me become super. The next day I’m one of those people. Super powers develop slowly. They don’t hit your head overnight. When you’re in the developing stage, you think it will go on forever. One day you’re lifting a bookshelf and the next day it’s a car. You expect to lift a building before the week is out. It rarely happens that way, but once you get that initial taste, you kind of expect that it will.

Another thing about super powers is that, contrary to what most people believe, most of the super powers aren’t all that super. I spoke about the strength, and everyone gets that. It’s a given. But the other stuff, most of the other stuff you wouldn’t pull a tissue out to sneeze at. One of my good friends, she can levitate small coins. It’s a fun parlor trick but it’s just that. She can’t hurl them around her at high speeds, or move anything larger than a coin or something that’s not made of metal. It’s very limited. But it went to her head anyways. She turned out to be one of those super villains. Not one of those destroy-the-world type villains, but a super villain. I guess the difference between the heroes and the villains is the villains expect to be treated better because of their super powers. The heroes just want to continue being people.