Answering the Question: Searching for my Superpower, Stuck with my Kryptonite.
On silencing my inner critic and discovering my true superpower.
The most enjoyable thing about writing this newsletter is seeing the reflections it speaks for all of you. In fact, the best way for me to answer this week’s question is by turning to one of the answers shared by one of our readers, Dakota. Take a few minutes to watch him discuss his superpower on TikTok.
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We love to see someone reframe what society would tell them is a weakness, a malfunction as their greatest strength. Dakota beautifully talks about the gift that his overthinking and anxiety are, and the give-and-take he has to balance when dealing with it all…
What is your superpower?
Answering the Question: Bouncing Back
…and that overthinking was critical to my reflection this week too. Not in identifying it as my superpower, but in it serving as a roadblock on my journey to that discovery.
I began exploring this topic by free-writing out what my superpower could be, based on my own thoughts and things others had told me before. At least, that’s what I had intended to do. But every time I started to write something out, I pulled my pencil back from the page and thought “But really?” My mind started to find holes in every possibility.
“This can’t be my superpower because…”
“If I told people my superpower they would say…”
“That just seems ridiculous to say.”
Rather than giving myself the freedom to just humor the possibilities, I was cutting myself off before I could even finish an idea. Overthinking them. Poking holes. I was letting my own perception of what everyone else might think about me staking out territory for myself affect my ability to honor myself.
And it took me all week to finally break through that noise. Because that’s all it was. Noise. This wasn’t a round table of strangers reading my journal and telling me who I am and who I’m not. This was me, getting in my own way. This was my internal narrator stopping me from writing my own story.
But I pushed through.
I managed to brainstorm a number of things with varying levels of veracity, but that didn’t matter. What I ultimately realized is that my superpower is the thing that kept me going all along.
Resilience.
The ability to push through, bounce back, withstand, recover.
Not the ability to avoid or prevent hard times, failures, or struggles, but the strength to navigate and emerge from them. To stop the spirals, to pull myself off the ground and keep chipping away at whatever boulder lies in front of me. Wallowing is not my style. I feel my feelings, I crack some jokes, but then I keep building that forward momentum.
Of course, it took a lot to get there. This was not something I was gifted when I was bit by a radioactive spider or hit by a lightning bolt. No, it was developed, built, strengthened. I put in The Work™ to build this ability for myself, and now I am thankful for the fact that I have. When the hits come (break-ups, professional adversities, personal loss), I know how to keep growing with them.
Something for the Weekend
If you’re on Twitter, you know Phil Lewis. He is the breaking news. But it’s his What I’m Reading Substack that I look forward to most now.
And this week he shared a ridiculously good piece from Soraya McDonald about Tina Turner (who you know I love). A snippet:
Tina Turner decamped to Europe in 1997 and relinquished her American citizenship after her 2013 marriage to Erwin Bach (the two were a couple for 37 years). She died in Switzerland, in a home she shared with a husband so devoted to her he gave her a kidney. She chose to go where she was loved, and that place was not her motherland. As much as America has proclaimed its love for Tuner in the wake of her death, it continues to fail to fully see her. And until it does, this place cannot truthfully claim to love Turner any more than her first husband could.
Please do yourself a favor and go read the piece in its entirety.
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See you Sunday.