Recognition of this hero narrative as a driver for my behaviors, preferences, and other unconscious motives isn't necessarily a trigger to rethink my entire life and identity. It's a chance to hijack that immediate response to something heroic and replace that impulse with something more intentional. That happened this morning. One of the books in the Kindle Daily Deal was a memoir by an F-16 pilot. My hero pleasure centers lit up at the potential of this book. There was all kinds of elite level stuff, doing things that are hard, being the best, it was all right there. Of course I was ready to buy it, but I stopped and took a moment to think about what I was feeling. I didn't see it right away, but the realization of the link to my hero thing came into focus pretty quickly. I didn't buy the book.
It's not that the pursuit of the heroic if necessarily bad. It's more about recognizing what I'm responding to and finding a different way to react. I've spent too long going with the automatic appeal of these types of stories. Stopping to take a look at what was so enticing about a book describing flying an F-16 against SAM sites lets me see a little deeper into what I have going on under the surface. It's the appeal of the best of the best, the elite, the distinct and clearly different level of performance. Those are the stories that I crave. Winning the competition, being thought of as special, that's what makes my psyche really sing when I come across these things. The stories are definitely exciting and highly entertaining, but it's the elite status of the story teller that really makes all the difference for me.
Pursuing the heroic isn't about going after what you want, it's all about doing what others find unique, valuable, and difficult. Decisions and actions are not based on what I find inherently appealing. My life turns into a pursuit of opportunities to impress other people. It's not even what other people will find legitimately appealing. It's about what I think should be impressive to other people. It's possible to end up doing something that I don't find all that appealing in an effort to impress people I don't even know by doing something that they might not even find all that impressive. It's crazy! Well, I should say it was crazy because that tendency was much stronger in my youth, but it's echo is still very strong in my life as an adult.
That's another aspect of this whole thing that has me disturbed. If the other orientation wasn't bad enough, the persistence of this immature motivation deep into my adulthood just adds another level of desperation. I can cut myself some slack and see that wanting to emulate heroes was a pretty decent way to deal with a lack of affection from my parents, a pretty weak self-image, and a guide for the right way to behave when I was a kid. It served its purpose and I should have moved on to more mature ways of engaging with life. That didn't happen, at least not as completely as it could have. I carried that legacy into my marriage and parenting and career. The hero encompasses so much of my identity it even colors which books I choose to read!
Seeing myself as the hero and doing all that I could to make that image a reality was limiting. The adoption of that orientation immediately put typical youth activities out of bounds. The hero adheres to all expectations (at least the conception of the heroic that I adhered to) and strives to stay within the lines of cultural expectations. The hero isn't a rebel. The hero accepts the challenges placed before him. To reject those challenges would be unthinkable. I wanted to be praised and adored by authority figures and those who could speak to my superior character, intelligence, and ability. There was no need to explore boundaries or wander off into unpopular but personally appealing activities. The hero makers were pretty clear on what they wanted so I went about giving it to them.
It's easy to take this idea and beat myself with it. But how will this insight impact me as I continue to live my life? Recognizing its role in my choices is a good first step. I don't need to reinvent myself, but consciously moving away from what a much younger version of myself used to get through the day will allow me to embrace and accept me. Chasing some idea of the heroic is really just a way to replace some negative view of myself with something more appealing. (Saving my brother, a task set by my mother, yet another way for me to pursue the hero. I'm really starting to hope that I'm just taking this whole idea too far...) Rejecting the heroic as the ideal allows me to just do what feels right rather that what I SHOULD be doing. Simple example, I was on a kick a month or so ago about reading harder books. The hero should suffer to go beyond the merely mortal and strive for more, and as such he should be willing to tackle the really challenging novels. Breaking that train of thought would be a good first step.
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