When I was, maybe, ten years old I was going to grow up to be a super Saiyan from Dragon Ball Z. I honed my kamehameha beam before bed every night and joined aikido but was inconsolable when the inevitable happened – or didn’t happen. I couldn’t kamehameha. Little girl depression set in and I had to come to terms with an obvious fact about life – there is no magic in the world.
Young me thought fiction had poisoned me, had lied about everything. There were no elves, hobbits, or dragons. No pocket monster friends – and there were definitely no super Saiyans. Good guys didn’t vanquish nothin’ and there weren’t even bad guys, not really.
Santa and the Easter Bunny were no longer real to me and this was the end of superheroes too. But most importantly I had lost the feeling that I could be anything, no holds barred, anything at all. The realization that I couldn’t grow up to be a super hero was devastating and I’ve thought about it many times over the years. What a strange thing… feeling like anything you can imagine could be true, if you believe in it enough.
Lately, I have come around a bit and begun to wonder if magic is real, after all.
But as an adult, I see it has more to do with the storytellers than the story characters…
Check out my longer post, Fiction is Real, on Small Words! Thanks for reading!
Leave a Reply