I have been digging around in my family tree long enough to know that some ancestors do not make my work easy. They appear as names. You find a birthdate if you are lucky…. even luckier if you find a marriage, some children, a death.. maybe even a location. Then you move backward another generation and do it all over again.

What makes it worth it? Every once in a while, you find someone like Matilda St Valéry, Lady of Bramber, my 28th great-grandmother.

Unlike those difficult to track ancestors, Matilda did not quietly exist and did not disappear into history. She appears in history because she managed estates and castles, became entangled in the brutal politics of King John’s reign, reportedly said something to the king’s representatives that she absolutely should not have said (this sounds so familiar), fled across the Irish Sea, was captured and ultimately starved to death in a royal dungeon.

She definitely makes my family tree more interesting.

Meet Grandma Matilda: she was born around the middle of the twelfth century and married William de Braose, 4th Lord of Bramber. William was super powerful. The de Braose family controlled lands across England, Wales and Ireland, and William became one of King John’s important barons. This was a family right in the middle of medieval politics which was a great place to be when the king liked you, but an extremely dangerous place to be when he didn’t. King John was not exactly famous for handling conflict with moderation.

One of the things I find frustrating about researching medieval women is how often they disappear behind their husbands. The historical record tells us what land a man owned, which battles he fought, which king he served and which political alliances he made. His wife can become little more than a first name attached to a marriage.

Matilda was not that wife. Chroniclers remembered her as formidable and capable. Later accounts particularly emphasized her strength of character, and tradition connected her with the defense of the family’s Welsh holdings. She wasn’t simply living inside William’s political world. She was participating in it and eventually, she participated a little too loudly… which is still dangerous for a woman today, let alone in medieval times.

So, how did she piss off King John? John’s nephew, Arthur of Brittany, had a legitimate claim to the English throne and became John’s rival. In 1202, Arthur was captured, but then he disappeared. Exactly what happened to him remains one of the great mysteries of medieval English history, although suspicion that John had Arthur killed began very early and William de Braose was rumored to have been involved somehow. According to later chroniclers, he knew what had happened to Arthur or at least knew enough to be dangerous.

When King John demanded that William provide his son as a hostage guaranteeing the family’s loyalty, Matilda reportedly refused and she didn’t simply say no. She allegedly said she would not hand her children over to a king who had murdered his own nephew. Imagine saying that to the representatives of the king whose nephew had mysteriously disappeared. That is either extraordinary courage, extraordinary anger, or the medieval equivalent of having absolutely no filter…. being related to me, it was possibly all three.

Whatever the exact truth behind the famous exchange, the relationship between King John and the de Braose family collapsed. John moved against them and they fled. Eventually Matilda and her eldest son, William, were captured in Ireland and delivered into John’s custody. They were imprisoned at Corfe Castle.

King John didn’t simply imprison them. According to contemporary chroniclers, he had Matilda and her son confined without adequate food and they starved to death. There are later, gruesome embellishments about how they were found. Those details are harder to establish and may belong more to legend than history, but the central fact is horrifying enough: a woman who had lived at the highest levels of medieval aristocratic society died imprisoned by her king alongside her son.

We don’t actually know what Matilda sounded like or whether the famous words attributed to her are exactly what she said. We don’t know what she thought when John’s men came and we certainly don’t know whether she would recognize herself in the descriptions written about her by men centuries (or even decades) removed from her private life. What we know is that she left an impression… enough of one that more than eight hundred years later, I can find her, not simply as: Matilda, wife of William, but as Matilda.

She was a woman remembered as strong-willed, capable and politically significant enough to become part of the story of one of England’s most infamous kings. Twenty-eight generations of great-grandmothers separate her life from mine. Women giving birth to daughters who gave birth to daughters and sons, marriages joining families, names changing, countries changing, entire political systems disappearing, and yet, eventually, somehow, that line reaches me.

I don’t think ancestry means we inherit someone’s personality. Twenty-eight generations is an enormous genetic and cultural distance, and I’m not going to claim Matilda’s medieval stubbornness has been sitting intact in my DNA for eight hundred years, but I will admit this: finding out that my 28th great-grandmother apparently looked at the authority of King John and essentially said, “Absolutely not.” Well. I did feel a tiny flicker of recognition.

I expected Belfast to look different. I knew the history before I arrived. I knew about the Troubles, and I knew, in the abstract, about Catholics and Protestants, Republicans and Loyalists, the IRA, British troops, bombings, shootings, Bloody Sunday, and eventually the Good Friday Agreement. I knew that history, but what I wasn’t prepared for was seeing what history had done to a city.

Belfast is vibrant and alive. There are restaurants, shops, tourists, beautiful buildings and people going about perfectly ordinary lives, but once you know what you’re looking at, you begin to notice walls, fences, gates, and murals. You see neighborhoods whose identities are obvious even though you’ve yet to meet its occupants, as well as roads and boundaries that make more sense when you understand who was supposed to be kept away from whom.

Some of Belfast’s so-called peace walls still stand more than a quarter century after the Good Friday Agreement. They were built because separating people was, at the time, safer than allowing them to come into contact. This stopped me and made me think (yes, it was painful).

The solution to violence was architecture.

When people could no longer trust one another to live safely beside each other, the city itself had to absorb the conflict. Concrete became protection, fences became reassurance, gates became peace, and once those things exist for long enough, removing them becomes much more complicated than simply deciding that the war is over.

That may have been the part of Belfast that affected me most… Peace came in 1998, but the walls did not simply disappear.

The Troubles lasted roughly three decades. Thousands of people were killed. Many more were injured, displaced, traumatized or touched by the conflict in ways that don’t fit neatly into statistics, but violence changes more than the people who experience it. It changes where people live, where children go to school, and which streets feel safe. Some symbols become reassuring while others become threatening.

It affects which version of history a child hears… who counts as “us”… and who becomes “them.”

That legacy is still visible in Belfast. The city itself has acknowledged that segregation and division continue to affect housing, education, infrastructure and social life long after conflict-related violence dramatically declined.

That’s an extraordinary thing to contemplate as an American. because lately I have been wondering what we are building… not physically, at least not yet…but socially.

America is not Northern Ireland. Our political divisions don’t map neatly onto the Troubles. Our history, religious divisions, constitutional questions and political institutions are different and pretending otherwise would flatten an incredibly complicated period of Northern Irish history, but societies don’t have to share the same history to recognize a warning in one another.

What frightened me in Belfast wasn’t that I thought America was destined to reproduce the Troubles. It was recognizing some of the ingredients that allow people to begin seeing their neighbors as enemies. We increasingly sort ourselves into camps, we consume different information/news, and we sometimes describe people with different political beliefs not merely as wrong, but as evil, dangerous, stupid, immoral or less deserving of a voice. We assume the worst motivation behind the other side’s actions and the best motivation behind our own.

I’ve notice we have stopped asking:

“How do we convince them?”

and have started asking:

“How do we defeat them?”

That is a dangerous transition, because democracy requires something extraordinarily difficult from us: accepting that people we believe are profoundly wrong still have a legitimate place in the society we share. They get to vote. They get to speak. They get to organize. Also, sometimes they win, and when they do, we have to continue living next door to one another. Also, sometimes we are wrong (I’m not admitting this again… screenshot it!)

I think Americans sometimes imagine political violence too dramatically We picture armies, battle lines, uniforms, and a declaration that something has begun, but political violence doesn’t begin with Civil War. Sustained political violence grows much more messily…. a threat… an attack…. retaliation. Someone becomes a martyr while someone else becomes a monster. Each side develops a story explaining why its own escalation is defensive.

People become afraid and fear makes previously unacceptable behavior seem reasonable. Boundaries begin moving one after another.

The most dangerous sentence may be:

“Well, what are we supposed to do? Look at what they did.”

Because the other side is saying exactly the same thing.

Eventually people who would once have been horrified by violence can begin excusing it when the victim belongs to the right category.

This terrifies me… not because every angry political argument inevitably ends in bloodshed (it doesn’t), but because democracies depend on maintaining a cultural boundary that says political violence is unacceptable even when we despise the person on the receiving end of it. Once that boundary becomes conditional, we have created something that is very difficult to contain.

This is what Belfast made me realize. The wall isn’t the beginning. The wall is what you build after trust has already collapsed. By the time a community needs concrete, steel and gates to feel safe from the people living a few hundred feet away, thousands of smaller failures have already occurred. People have already learned whom to fear, families have already learned where not to go, and children have already inherited stories about what “those people” did. Institutions have already adapted to division. The physical wall simply makes permanent what has already happened inside people’s minds.

Why do I keep thinking about the good U S of A? Our walls are mostly invisible right now. They are in our social circles, media, algorithms, assumptions, and language. The are in our willingness to sever relationships over politics and our increasing certainty that people on the other side aren’t merely mistaken but fundamentally bad.

We should care about those walls before anyone needs to build them out of concrete.

There is another mistake I don’t want to make. I don’t want to visit Belfast, see the scars of the Troubles, and reduce this remarkable city to its wounds, because Belfast is a story of hope and shows what people can do after terrible things have happened. Belfast highlights people who had every reason to distrust one another chose a political process instead… Not everyone agreed… Not everyone forgave… Not every grievance disappeared… and not every wall came down.

Peace did not require everyone to suddenly like each other and that is Belfast’s most important lesson. Peace is not agreement nor pretending our differences don’t matter. It isn’t abandoning our principles. Sometimes peace is simply the collective decision that whatever our disagreements are, we will not resolve them by destroying one another.

That sounds like an incredibly low bar until a society loses it and once it does, rebuilding it can take generations.

I left Belfast thinking about how long the consequences of a political moment can last...A riot lasts a night…A bombing lasts seconds…and a killing takes a life, but the fear created by those acts can alter a neighborhood for fifty years. A child can be born decades later and still inherit the geography created by violence that happened before their parents were adults.

That’s the part I wish more Americans understood. We are not only deciding what kind of country we want today. We are constructing the country someone else may have to live in decades from now and we still get to choose what we build.

Every time we normalize political violence, dehumanize millions of strangers, celebrate someone’s suffering because they’re on the “wrong” side, or decide that democratic rules only matter when our side wins, we put another brick somewhere.

Maybe the wall never gets built and I desperately hope it doesn’t, but Belfast reminded me that countries don’t wake up one morning and decide to divide themselves. They do it piece by piece…. grievance by grievance… exception by exception… until one day someone decides that the safest thing to put between neighbors is a wall…. And decades after the violence ends, their grandchildren may still be trying to figure out how to take it down.

One of the hardest parts of becoming good at something is accepting that you’ll still get it wrong and it’s not because you don’t care or because you aren’t trying, but because experience doesn’t eliminate mistakes. It just changes what they look like. When we’re new, our mistakes are obvious. We don’t know the rules, so we break them. We ask questions, we learn, and people expect us to make errors because we’re inexperienced. Once you get good at the job, it all changes. People start calling us the expert, and suddenly, mistakes feel different. Experts aren’t supposed to get things wrong.

Well, that’s the lie I tell myself anyway.

Recently, I found myself in an uncomfortable situation at work. I had created a situation that was more confusing than I intended. My intentions had always been good, every decision I’d made had a reason, and every exception had a story behind it, but intentions don’t erase outcomes. The outcome was that I had helped create blurred boundaries. The moment I recognized it, I had a choice. I could explain OR I could justify OR I could defend every decision that led me there.

OR...

I could simply say, “You’re right. I need to do better.”

That sentence is harder than it sounds… not because apologizing is difficult, but because our brains immediately start building a case for ourselves.

“But you don’t understand the context.”

“This wasn’t what I meant.”

“If you knew the whole story...”

Sometimes those things are true and sometimes context does matter, but sometimes we use context to protect our pride instead of improving our practice.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over my career is that accountability isn’t about proving you were wrong. It’s about asking a different question.

“Now that I know better, what am I going to change?”

That’s the only question that actually moves us forward. The mistake already happened, an explanation doesn’t undo it and the only thing we control is what comes next.

I’ve spent years teaching other people. I’ve trained staff, coached managers, and helped organizations build better systems, so for a moment I thought, “I should have known better.”

Then I realized something. Knowing better isn’t permanent and learning isn’t something we finish. If we’re still growing, there will always be another moment where we realize we were missing something.

That’s not failure… that’s education.

I worry sometimes that we’ve created a culture where admitting a mistake feels more dangerous than making one. People double down, become defensive, and spend enormous amounts of energy trying to prove they weren’t technically wrong. Imagine if we redirected that energy. Imagine saying:

“I didn’t see that before.”

“Thank you for pointing it out.”

“I’m changing the way I do this.”

How many problems would disappear if we normalized learning instead of defending?

The people I respect most aren’t the ones who’ve never made mistakes. They’re the ones who make it safe for everyone else to admit theirs. They don’t pretend to be perfect. They model curiosity, ask questions, and change their minds. They revise policies they wrote. They apologize without adding an essay explaining why they deserve forgiveness. They understand that credibility doesn’t come from always being right. It comes from being trustworthy when you’re wrong.

The older I get, the less interested I am in protecting my ego. I’d rather protect my integrity and integrity isn’t never making mistakes. Integrity is being willing to look directly at one, own it completely, learn everything you can from it, and move forward without letting shame keep you stuck. Because mistakes are inevitable and growth is optional. Every mistake gives us that choice. I hope I never become so convinced of my own experience that I stop choosing growth.

Every workplace has one and you know “that guy”. They’ve worked with the same individual for quite some time. They know exactly how they like their coffee, what route they take through Walmart, what songs they’ll tolerate in the car, and which restaurant will absolutely result in a thirty-minute debate over chicken strips.

Guess what? That’s great! Experience matters and so do relationships, but the real risk?… that healthy relationship mutating into something...weird.

“My client.” “No one else can work with him.” “She only likes me.” “Don’t schedule anyone else.” “I’ll just take care of it.”

Congratulations. You made it weird AND you’ve accidentally become a dragon sitting on top of a very specific treasure hoard… and that treasure is a human being.

Clients are NOT Pokémon. You don’t catch them, you don’t collect them, and you absolutely don’t get exclusive ownership rights because you’ve worked with them the longest. In human services, we’re assigned to support people NOT possess them. That may sound obvious, but you’d be amazed how quickly people start acting like they’re defending custody arrangements instead of sharing support responsibilities.

Every organization has heard some version of these statements:

“Only I know how to calm him down.” “Only I know her routine.” “She’ll refuse if someone else takes her.” “He won’t go unless I’m there.”

Maybe that true, but here’s the uncomfortable question: Is that because the individual truly can’t work with anyone else... or because no one else has been given the opportunity? Sometimes we’ve accidentally trained the person receiving services that only one staff member is “safe.”

That’s not person-centered. That’s dependency with really good intentions.

Let’s play a game. Imagine tomorrow you:

• Win the lottery.

• Move to Hawaii.

• Decide you’ve had enough and become a llama farmer.

• Get promoted.

• Get the flu.

• Get hit by a bus.

(Dramatic? Sure but work with me… I’m naturally pretty dramatic!)

What happens to your client? If the answer is, “Everything falls apart,” that’s not a flex… that’s a systems failure.

Some people believe that if they’re the only one who can support someone, they’ll always have value and that they have job security. The opposite is usually true. The people leaders trust most are the ones who teach everyone else. They write good documentation, explain what works, share ideas, and celebrate when another staff member builds a great relationship.

That’s confidence. Gatekeeping usually comes from fear.

NOW, imagine your own life if you were only allowed to have one friend: one person to go to dinner with… one person to help you solve problems… one person to go on adventures with. Sounds awful, right? So why would we accidentally create that for someone receiving services?

The goal is a bigger circle… more trusted people… more opportunities… and more community. It’s not to have one overworked DSP carrying the entire relationship on their shoulders.

Here’s the secret: the best support staff eventually make themselves...less necessary. This isn’t because they stop caring or don’t work as hard. It is because they teach, coach, build confidence, help people become comfortable with new staff, and encourage independence. Ironically, the staff who are most willing to “share” people usually become the most respected members of the team.

So the Next Time You Catch Yourself Saying... “That’s my client.”

Try replacing it with: “That’s someone I have the privilege of supporting.”

It’s less possessive, it’s more accurate, and it reminds us who this work is actually about, because at the end of the day, the measure of a great support professional isn’t how many people depend on you. It’s how many people become more independent because you were there.

And if you do decide to become a llama farmer... please invite the rest of us.

Andrew Johnson’s rise to the presidency feels like the kind of story most people admire. He was born poor, had almost no formal education, taught himself basic literacy, worked as a tailor, and climbed from poverty into national politicsHe embodied the classic American self-made man story. To supporters at the time, Johnson represented the working class and proof that ordinary people, not just elites, could rise to power.

When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, many hoped Johnson would carry forward Lincoln’s vision of rebuilding the country after the Civil War, but that is not what happened. Instead, Johnson’s presidency became one of the clearest examples in American history of how one leader can dramatically reverse the momentum of progress. At the exact moment the country was deciding what freedom would actually mean after slavery, Johnson consistently sided against efforts to expand rights for newly freed Black Americans.

Johnson’s political identity centered around familiar images: a poor Southern man who rose through hard work, a defender of ordinary workers against wealthy elites, a Union loyalist who stayed with the United States despite being from Tennessee, and a leader supposedly positioned to reunify the country after war. He was often portrayed as proof that democracy worked and that someone without privilege could rise into the presidency through grit alone… and unlike many Southern politicians of his era, he opposed secession, but opposing secession did not mean supporting equality.

The Reality: Reconstruction Sabotage and the Protection of White Supremacy

1. Johnson almost immediately undermined Reconstruction

After the Civil War ended, the country faced a massive question: What happens next?

Millions of formerly enslaved people were suddenly free and the South’s political structure had collapsed. Congress began debating how to rebuild the country. Johnson took an incredibly lenient approach toward former Confederates. He issued sweeping pardons to former Confederate officials, allowed former Southern leaders to quickly regain political power, re-admitted Southern states with very few conditions, and opposed efforts to fundamentally restructure Southern political systems. Instead of forcing the South to transform, Johnson largely allowed old power structures to rebuild themselves.

2. He actively fought civil rights legislation

Congress began pushing legislation designed to protect newly freed Black Americans, but Johnson opposed nearly all of it. He vetoed the extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which helped formerly enslaved people transition into freedom as well as The Civil Rights Act of 1866, which attempted to guarantee citizenship and legal protections. Congress overrode him which was something incredibly rare at the time. Johnson argued the federal government should not interfere so heavily in the South, but in practice, his position left freed Black Americans almost entirely unprotected.

3. Black Codes flourished under his leadership

Because Johnson allowed Southern states to reestablish governments so quickly, many immediately passed what became known as Black Codes. These laws restricted where Black Americans could live, limited employment opportunities, criminalized unemployment and poverty, and allowed forced labor systems that closely resembled slavery itself. Legally, slavery had ended, but in practice, Southern governments began rebuilding systems designed to preserve white control. Johnson allowed it.

4. The first presidential impeachment in history

Johnson’s constant battles with Congress eventually reached a breaking point. Radical Republicans believed he was actively sabotaging Reconstruction. In 1868, Congress impeached Johnson. He became the first president in U.S. history to face impeachment, but avoided removal by just one Senate vote While the impeachment technically centered around violations of the Tenure of Office Act, the deeper conflict was obvious: Congress believed Johnson was obstructing efforts to create a more equal post-war America.

5. His racism was not subtle

Unlike some earlier presidents whose racial views were complicated, Johnson’s views were blunt. He openly believed that white Americans should remain politically dominant, federal protections for Black citizens went too far, and that the South should largely govern itself without outside interference. His presidency repeatedly demonstrated that ending slavery and supporting racial equality were not the same thing. Johnson accepted emancipation because the war had settled it, but he had little interest in what freedom actually looked like afterward.

What Andrew Johnson Teaches Us

Andrew Johnson reminds us of something history teaches over and over again: Progress is never guaranteed. The end of slavery should have marked the beginning of a radically different America, but instead, Johnson’s presidency shows how quickly political power can be used to protect old systems even after those systems are supposedly defeated. He teaches us that ending injustice is not the same as dismantling the structures behind it, leadership can reverse progress just as easily as it can create it, political institutions matter BUT so do the people occupying them, and that sometimes history moves forward AND sometimes people in power drag it backward.

Johnson did not create slavery, but at one of the most important turning points in American history, he helped ensure that freedom would remain deeply incomplete and the consequences of that failure would echo for generations.

I spent today in leadership training with my fellow leadership team. Like most professional development courses, the curriculum itself was familiar territory: communication, coaching, accountability, building trust, inspiring others, organizational growth, and the endless pursuit of becoming the kind of leader people choose to follow rather than simply obey. There were exercises designed to identify admired leaders, discussions around personal leadership growth, conversations about what separates management from leadership, and frameworks intended to help us better understand how to move organizations and people toward success.

I learned a great deal, but strangely, the most profound lesson I took away had very little to do with the actual curriculum, because somewhere between discussions of leadership theory and organizational systems, I found myself confronting an uncomfortable realization. Sometimes the hardest person you will ever have to lead is yourself.

Walking Into a Room Carrying Old Stories

This particular training presented an unexpected challenge for me. The trainer had professional connections to a former employer of mine… an organization I left under circumstances I know are still discussed long after my departure. To put it simply, it was an environment I experienced as deeply toxic and although I have long since moved forward professionally, I am not naïve enough to believe organizations stop telling stories about the people who leave them especially when those departures are not clean.

I walked into this training carrying an invisible burden and I found myself wondering whether this trainer already had preconceived notions about me. Had he heard things? Had opinions about me already been formed before I ever sat down? Because of that uncertainty, I immediately found myself editing my own behavior. There were questions I wanted to ask that I chose not to ask… questions about toxic leadership… questions about unhealthy organizational cultures… and questions about navigating situations where leadership itself becomes the problem, but I worried asking those questions might reveal too much. I worried they would sound less like professional curiosity and more like criticism and so I stayed quiet.

In retrospect, I realized something important. Leadership often requires confronting the stories we assume other people are telling about us, but more importantly, it requires confronting the stories we are telling ourselves.

The Weight of Defending Yourself

At one point during training, I asked a question about leaving unhealthy workplaces. The trainer responded by sharing his own experience leaving a difficult environment. He emphasized that he had handled the departure gracefully. He gave substantial notice and left professionally. Immediately I felt defensive, because I did not leave gracefully. I gave two weeks notice, left abruptly, and was super clear about my unhappiness in a less than professional way. I know people judged me for that decision.

What nobody in that room knew was that after more than thirty years in the workforce, this was the only job I have ever left in such a manner. They did not know the health struggles I was managing at the time. They did not know the circumstances surrounding my decision. They did not know how long I wrestled with staying before I finally accepted that leaving was necessary.

For a moment, I wanted to explain myself. I wanted to defend my choices and I wanted to tell the whole story, but then something in me shifted, because I realized something very simple. I do not owe everyone an explanation for decisions I made during chapters of my life they know nothing about.

Maybe his comment was directed at me and maybe it wasn’t, but I recognized something important. My reaction had very little to do with his opinion of me. It had everything to do with my own unresolved discomfort surrounding how that chapter ended, and in that moment, while sitting in leadership training, I found myself practicing one of the most difficult leadership skills imaginable:

Self-management.

I chose to extend grace. I allowed the comment to exist without assuming it was about me and I accepted that leadership sometimes means resisting the urge to defend yourself against narratives that may only exist inside your own head.

Management Is Not Leadership

One of the earliest concepts introduced during training was deceptively simple. Management is not leadership. It sounds obvious, but I think organizations misunderstand this distinction constantly. Management is structure, process, and compliance. Management ensures tasks are completed. Leadership is something entirely different. Leadership is influence and trust. Leadership is creating environments where people feel capable enough to succeed.

Organizations often reward people for being effective managers and assume leadership naturally follows, but controlling systems and leading human beings are not the same skill set. I work in disability services, where this distinction becomes impossible to ignore. Success in this field rarely comes from controlling people.

It comes from building systems that support autonomy.

It comes from recognizing potential rather than enforcing compliance.

It comes from helping people develop confidence in their own ability to succeed.

And increasingly, I find myself questioning how many organizations confuse authority with leadership while never realizing they are fundamentally different things.

People Need To Feel Important

People follow people they know, like, and respect. This theme repeated throughout the training over and over. Every person wants to feel important. Good leaders help people recognize their own potential, catch people doing things right, praise small victories, celebrate progress, and build confidence.

At first glance, these ideas sound simple… almost obvious, but the longer I sat with them, the more I realized how often leadership advice focuses entirely on performance while ignoring a basic psychological truth. Human beings perform better when they believe their effort matters. People do not thrive when they feel invisible not do they grow when their contribution feels irrelevant.

The greatest leaders I have encountered rarely possessed extraordinary intelligence or charisma. What set them apart was their ability to make other people feel seen, and immediately, I thought about my father.

The Leaders We Learn From Quietly

One exercise asked us to identify a leader we admired. I chose my father and not because of the incredible positions he held (although he was very accomplished with an incredible career), but because he possesses something I think matters far more than titles ever could. He makes people feel seen. My father has always had a remarkable ability to make people feel respected in his presence. He listens fully, makes people feel like what they are saying matters, and carries himself in ways that quietly communicate dignity toward others.

Now, as Parkinson’s gradually changes what his body allows him to do, I continue watching him teach me something even more profound. He keeps going. He continues moving through adversity with optimism that would break many people and showing strength in ways that have nothing to do with physical capability. I realized something watching him.

Leadership is not demonstrated when circumstances are favorable.

Leadership reveals itself when life begins taking things from you.

Leadership is how you carry yourself when suffering enters the room.

Leadership is deciding what kind of presence you remain for others even while navigating your own hardship.

I think I admire him because he reminds me that strength is often quiet.

The Danger of Self-Sabotage

One statement we wrote during training stood out to me later. Self-sabotage is real. Yes, it a simple statement, but I think it may be one of the most important lessons leaders can learn. We spend enormous amounts of energy trying to solve external problems: difficult employees, broken systems, organizational barriers, poor communication, and financial constraints, but rarely do we examine the internal habits quietly undermining our own growth.

Sometimes self-sabotage looks obvious: fear of failure, procrastination, and avoidance, but often it is quieter than that. Sometimes self-sabotage looks like staying too long in environments that diminish you. Sometimes it looks like internalizing criticism from people whose opinions no longer deserve authority over your life. Sometimes it looks like undervaluing your own expertise. Sometimes it looks like believing your mistakes permanently define you.

I realized during this training how often my own internal dialogue still carries remnants of experiences I thought I had already moved beyond.

Leadership requires confronting those internal narratives, because if you cannot lead yourself well, eventually you will struggle to lead others well.

Bad Leadership Defines People By Limitation

One phrase from training stayed with me longer than anything else. Telling someone what they cannot do is bad leadership. I work in disability services and I spend much of my professional life watching systems unintentionally do exactly this. Families, organizations, service systems, and professionals ALL do this.

We define people by limitations instead of possibilities and focus on what people struggle with instead of what they might become. I realized this principle extends far beyond disability services. Good leadership does not focus on limitation; good leadership identifies possibility. It asks better questions.

Not: What can’t this person do?

But: What conditions would allow this person to succeed?

I suspect many organizations fail because leaders become so focused on enforcing expectations that they stop seeing human potential entirely.

My Leadership Work Right Now Is Practical

I walked into training assuming leadership growth meant becoming more inspirational, charismatic, and motivational, but I left realizing something else entirely. My own growth as a leader right now is not philosophical. It is operational.

At the end of the training, I identified my own leadership goal:

Strengthen leadership through communication systems. Improve organizational communication systems to reduce operational errors, improve accountability, and strengthen team alignment.

I wrote down concrete areas I need to improve:

Standardizing communication expectations.

Developing escalation pathways.

Implementing regular accountability check-ins.

Reducing compliance failures caused by preventable communication breakdowns.

I realized leadership is rarely grand speeches. It is rarely dramatic moments. It is rarely standing in front of a room inspiring people. More often, leadership is invisible. It is systems, structure, clarity, consistency, and building environments where success becomes easier because the systems themselves support people well.

Leadership Is Lifelong Work

One final note I scribbled during training keeps replaying in my head.

History is history. Changing the future is possible and probable.

I think leadership development is often misunderstood. People imagine leadership as something you become or maybe a title you earn or a destination you eventually arrive at, but leadership is not static. It is lifelong work. It requires constant reassessment, constant humility, and constant willingness to examine your own blind spots.

Sometimes leadership means building better systems.

Sometimes leadership means helping other people see their own value.

Sometimes leadership means making difficult decisions others may not understand.

And sometimes leadership means sitting quietly in a training room, recognizing your own internal reactions, choosing not to defend yourself, and realizing the hardest work happening in that moment is not learning how to lead others.

It is learning how to lead yourself and perhaps that is where all good leadership begins.

History is history, but changing the future remains possible and probable.

The more I write and the older I get, the more I think most superhero stories are not about power. They’re about loneliness which is strange, because superheroes are almost never alone. They’re surrounded by people. Entire worlds depend on them and yet some of the loneliest characters ever written wear capes. That can’t be an accident.

When I started this series, I thought I was writing about superheroes. What I eventually realized is that I was writing about people, the masks we wear, and the burdens we carry. Underneath almost every superhero story, I kept finding the same thing: loneliness… not physical loneliness, but a deeper kind of loneliness… the loneliness of feeling unseen, the loneliness of being needed more than you are known, and the loneliness of carrying something nobody else fully understands.

Take Superman. People often see him as the most powerful superhero ever created. What I see is someone everyone depends on. The world, the city, and his friends all need Superman. The people around him constantly need something from him, but very few people ask: “What does Clark need?” Being valued for what you provide rather than who you are is incredibly lonely.

Batman experiences a different version. Bruce Wayne is surrounded by people, and yet he spends most of his life emotionally isolated, because grief became his identity, the mission became his purpose, and control became his safety. The tragedy of Batman isn’t that he lost his parents. It’s that he never fully leaves the alley where he lost them. The mission protects him from pain, but it also protects him from intimacy.

Then there’s Spider-Man… the most relatable superhero ever written. Peter Parker isn’t lonely because nobody loves him. He’s lonely because responsibility keeps getting in the way of connection. Someone always needs him and eventually Peter discovers what many adults discover: you can spend your life helping everyone else and still feel completely exhausted.

Thor carries the loneliness of expectations, the loneliness of trying to become worthy of a legacy, and the loneliness of constantly asking: “Am I enough?” This is not asking if he is enough to win a battle, but is he enough as a person, enough without the title, enough without the power, and enough without proving himself.

Wolverine carries survival. Deadpool carries pain behind jokes. The Hulk carries emotions he fears will hurt others. Professor X carries responsibility for everyone around him. Wonder Woman carries hope in a world that often rewards cynicism. They all have different stories, different powers, and different struggles, but the pattern keeps repeating. Why? Because most superheroes share the same wound. They believe their value comes from what they do for other people. Batman protects, Superman saves, Spider-Man sacrifices, Wonder Woman guides, Professor X leads, The Hulk contains, Wolverine endures, Thor proves, and Deadpool performs. Every one of them is trying to earn something: acceptance, purpose, worthiness, belonging, love, connection, and in the process, many of them become isolated from the very thing they are seeking, because usefulness and intimacy are not the same thing. This may be the most important lesson I have taken from this entire series.

You can be admired and still feel alone.

You can be respected and still feel unseen.

You can be needed and still feel disconnected.

You can be depended on by dozens of people and still quietly wonder if anyone actually knows you.

That is superhero loneliness. A lot of adults become superheroes without realizing it: the caretaker, the leader, the problem solver, the parent, the fixer. People start depending on them, trusting them, leaning on them, and calling them first when things go wrong. Over time something happens. The role grows larger than the person and people stop seeing the human underneath. Sometimes the superhero stops seeing themselves too, because when your identity becomes tied to being useful, it becomes terrifying to ask: “Who am I if I stop saving everyone else?”

That question sits underneath almost every hero we’ve talked about. It’s underneath Superman’s burden, Batman’s grief, Spider-Man’s exhaustion, Thor’s search for worthiness, Wolverine’s survival, Professor X’s hope, Wonder Woman’s compassion, The Hulk’s fear, Deadpool’s humor, and The X-Men’s need to belong.

Different costumes. Different powers. The same human struggle.

Maybe that’s why we love superhero stories, not because we dream of becoming powerful, but because we recognize ourselves in them. Underneath every cape is a human being asking a very old question: “If I stop saving everyone else, will anyone still choose me?”

Perhaps that’s the real reason superheroes matter. Not because they can fly, lift buildings, or bend reality, but because they remind us that even the strongest people are still looking for connection. Maybe the most heroic thing any of us can do is stop trying to earn love through usefulness long enough to believe we might deserve it anyway.

Professor X is one of the few superheroes whose greatest burden is not his powers; it’s his responsibility. Batman carries grief, Spider-Man carries guilt, Thor carries expectation, but Professor X carries hope and hope can be really heavy. Most people think Charles Xavier is a story about telepathy, but he is not… he’s a story about leadership, more specifically; Professor X is about what happens when everyone expects you to have the answers.

Xavier seems calm, wise, patient, and composed. He sits in a wheelchair, speaks thoughtfully, and always seems to know exactly what to do, but that’s just an image and his reality is much more complicated, because leadership is often a performance of certainty while carrying enormous uncertainty underneath.

I understand this. There is a strange burden that comes with becoming the person other people look to for direction. When people are scared, they look at you. When people are uncertain, they look at you. When conflict erupts, they look at you. When things go wrong, they look at you. Over time, many leaders begin to feel an unspoken pressure to stay calm, confident, optimistic, and strong even when they are struggling too. That’s Professor X. Everyone sees the mentor, but very few people see the man carrying the weight of the mission.

One of the most fascinating things about Xavier is that his dream is bigger than himself. He isn’t just protecting people. He’s trying to change the future. He’s trying to build a world where mutants and humans can coexist, where fear doesn’t automatically become hatred, where difference doesn’t automatically become exclusion, and where people belong. That’s a beautiful vision, but it’s also tiring, because the larger the dream, the more disappointment you have to survive. People resist change and disappoint. Progress moves slowly while fear, conflict, and hatred returns. Xavier keeps believing anyway and that’s what makes him so incredible: not his intelligence or his telepathy, but his persistence and the willingness to keep believing in people after people repeatedly give him reasons not to. That’s so much harder than it sounds.

One of the reasons Magneto is such an effective counterpart is because he constantly forces Xavier to confront the possibility that hope might fail.

Magneto asks:

“What if people never change?”

Professor X answers:

“What if they do?”

Neither man knows and that’s the point. Hope is not certainty. Hope is choosing a direction despite uncertainty. I think that’s one of the most misunderstood things about optimism. People often assume optimism means believing everything will work out, but real optimism sounds more like:

“I don’t know if this will work, but I believe it’s worth trying.”

That takes courage especially after disappointment, loss, and betrayal.

One of the most interesting things about Professor X is his telepathy. Most people see it as a superpower, but symbolically, I see it as something else: emotional labor. Think about it. Charles is constantly aware of fear, pain, conflict, insecurity, anger, loneliness, and trauma. He’s carrying awareness of what everyone around him is experiencing. While he’s helping everyone else carry their burdens, his own often become invisible. That’s Xavier’s loneliness; the higher people place you on a pedestal, the fewer people see you as human.

People see the mentor, the leader, the teacher, and the visionary. They stop seeing
the exhausted person underneath. That isolation shows up in many leadership roles. People assume competence means certainty, wisdom means confidence, and leadership means strength, but leaders still doubt themselves, they still feel afraid, and they still wonder if they’re getting it wrong. Professor X knows this better than most, because despite all his intelligence, despite all his gifts, despite all his influence, he cannot force people to become better. He can only invite them.

That’s another difficult lesson. You can guide, teach, support, and encourage people, but you cannot make their choices for them. That reality is really frustrating, because many of us desperately want to save others from pain. At some point, everyone learns the same difficult truth: you can create opportunities for growth, but you cannot guarantee outcomes. Professor X understands this and yet he keeps trying. That might be the most heroic thing about him.. not because he succeeds perfectly, but because he continues despite uncertainty… because he continues despite disappointment… because he continues despite evidence that fear is often easier than understanding.

Magneto fears the future will repeat the past while Professor X believes the future can be different. Neither man knows for certain and that’s what makes hope an act of courage rather than a prediction. Maybe that’s why Professor X matters… not because he can read minds, but because he reminds us that leadership is not about having all the answers. It’s about continuing to believe in possibilities after certainty has disappeared, carrying responsibility without surrendering to despair, helping people become better without controlling who they become, and perhaps most importantly: it’s about choosing hope even when fear would be easier, because sometimes the bravest thing a person can do is continue believing in humanity after humanity has disappointed them. That is Professor X’s superpower. Everything else is just telepathy.

Trauma, fear, and the promise of “never again”

Magneto is a pretty uncomfortable character because his fear makes sense and that’s what makes him dangerous. Most villains are easy to dismiss. They’re greedy, cruel, power hungry, and destructive. Magneto is something much harder to confront. He’s often right about the danger; he’s just wrong about the solution and that’s what makes him one of the most realistic characters ever created.

At his core, Magneto is not a story about power. He’s a story about trauma and, more specifically, Magneto is a story about what happens when a person survives something so awful that they stop believing the world can ever truly be safe again.

Magneto doesn’t wake up in the morning thinking:

“How can I hurt people today?”

He wakes up thinking:

“How do I make sure what happened before never happens again?”

Many villains pursue power because they want control over others, but Magneto pursues power because he once experienced complete powerlessness and there is a huge difference between those motivations. One of the most psychologically realistic things about trauma is that it changes a person’s relationship with safety. People who have experienced profound loss, violence, persecution, betrayal, abuse, or war often stop assuming safety is normal and, instead, they become hyper-vigilant: scanning, preparing, planning, anticipating, and always watching for signs that danger is returning.

That’s who Magneto is: hyper-vigilance with superpowers. He’s constantly looking for threats, constantly anticipating betrayal, and constantly preparing for the moment when history repeats itself. Many trauma survivors understand this instinct immediately, because trauma often creates an internal promise: NEVER AGAIN!

Never again will I be helpless.
Never again will I trust that easily.
Never again will I be caught off guard.
Never again will I depend on someone else for safety.

Those promises make sense and, in many ways, they’re protective, but the problem is that over time they can become prisons. That’s Magneto’s tragedy. His desire to protect his people is understandable. His fear is understandable. His vigilance is understandable. What becomes dangerous is when survival stops being a response to danger and becomes an identity.

At some point, Magneto stops asking:

“What kind of future do I want to build?”

And starts asking:

“How do I prevent the past from happening again?”

Those sound similar, but they aren’t. One is driven by hope, while the other is driven by fear and fear changes people. Fear narrows possibilities and reduces trust. Fear makes control feel safer than vulnerability and turns uncertainty into a threat.

One of the reasons Magneto resonates so deeply is because many people have experienced versions of this: a painful relationship ends, a betrayal happens, or a trauma occurs. Suddenly life becomes organized around prevention. Protect yourself.
Guard yourself. Prepare yourself. Never let it happen again. At first, those strategies help, but eventually many people discover something difficult. A life organized entirely around protection leaves very little room for connection.

That’s where Magneto and Professor X become even more interesting. Most people think they represent good and evil, but I don’t. I think they represent two trauma responses. Both men understand persecution, fear, and what it means to be hated for who they are. Both want safety, dignity, and survival. The difference is what they learned from suffering.

Professor X believes:

“If we show people our humanity, eventually understanding is possible.”

Magneto believes:

“I’ve already seen what fear does to people. Trusting them is dangerous.”

Neither belief emerges from nowhere. Both are shaped by experience and both are attempts to answer the same question:

“How do you survive in a world that fears you?”

That’s why their conflict endures, because it exists inside many of us. Part of us wants to trust while another part of us remembers why we stopped. Part of us believes people can grow while another part of us remembers every time they didn’t. Part of us wants connection, but another part of us wants protection.

Magneto simply lets protection win and that’s what makes him tragic, because beneath all the power, all the anger, all the certainty, there is still a wounded person trying to prevent suffering. The problem is that trauma often convinces people that control is the same thing as safety, but it isn’t. Control can reduce risk, but it cannot eliminate vulnerability. Nothing can. Not power, not strength, not intelligence, not preparation and, at some point, every meaningful human relationship requires trust, every act of hope requires uncertainty, and every act of love requires risk. Magneto understands risk so well that he eventually struggles to believe those things are worth it and that’s his real tragedy: not in his powers or in his actions, but in his worldview, because the real danger of trauma is not always the pain itself. Sometimes the real danger is allowing the pain to become the lens through which you view everything else.

The tragedy of Magneto is not that he experienced trauma. It’s that trauma eventually became his entire worldview. He stopped imagining a future different from the past. He stopped believing people could become better than they had been. He stopped believing trust could be stronger than fear.

Maybe that’s why the character stays popular, because most people have faced moments where fear felt wiser than hope, where self-protection felt safer than connection, and where cynicism felt smarter than optimism. Magneto reminds us where that road can lead not because he is evil, but because he is understandable and honestly, the most unsettling villains are always the ones who are, because deep down, Magneto is asking a question many trauma survivors quietly ask themselves:

“If the world hurt me once, why should I believe it won’t do it again?”

The answer is not simple, but perhaps that’s why Professor X continues to stand across from him… not as his opposite, but as a reminder that surviving the past and trusting the future are not the same thing and healing requires learning the difference.

The X-Men superhero stories begin with a painful truth: sometimes the thing that makes you special is also the thing that makes you feel alone.

Most superhero stories start with power, but The X-Men start with rejection and its an important difference. Batman becomes Batman because of tragedy, Spider-Man becomes Spider-Man because of an accident, Thor is born into power, and Superman hides extraordinary abilities, but the X-Men are different. They don’t become outsiders because of what they do. They become outsiders because of who they are.

Most people have experienced some version of that feeling: being the weird kid, different, disabled, neurodivergent, LGBTQ+, the outsider in your family, or the only one who sees the world a certain way. The details change, but the feeling doesn’t. That feeling is:

“If people see who I really am, will I still belong?”

The X-Men’s powers aren’t just abilities; they’re metaphors. Cyclops can’t make eye contact without risking harm. Rogue cannot touch the people she loves. Nightcrawler looks visibly different no matter how kind he is. Storm learns to control overwhelming emotional and physical power. Beast struggles with appearing monstrous despite his intelligence and compassion. Jean Grey fears the destructive potential inside herself. These aren’t really stories about mutations. They’re stories about identity, about carrying something that separates you from the people around you, and about learning whether that difference is a curse or simply part of who you are. Honestly, one of the most fascinating parts of the X-Men mythology is how much energy the characters spend hiding, not because they’re ashamed of their powers, but because they’re afraid of rejection.

That feels familiar to a lot of people. Many people spend years masking. They learn what to say, how to behave, how to appear normal, how to avoid drawing attention, and how to hide the parts of themselves that seem inconvenient, strange, emotional, intense, or different. The goal isn’t deception; the goal is belonging. That’s what makes the X-Men feel so real. Most superheroes hide their identities to protect other people, but The X-Men often hide themselves to protect themselves. One of the reasons the X-Men stories became so culturally powerful is because they recognize something deeply human: belonging is not a luxury… it is a need. People can survive rejection, but they rarely thrive in it.

Humans are social creatures. We want connection, acceptance, and community. We want to feel understood. We want to know there is a place where we can stop performing and simply exist. That is what Xavier’s School represents, not just education or training, but belonging. It’s a place where nobody has to explain why they are different, difference is expected, and nobody has to apologize for existing. That idea is far more powerful than laser eyes or telepathy, because everyone is looking for some version of that school: a workplace, friend group, family, community, and/or relationship. We are looking for somewhere we can finally stop pretending.

Of course, the X-Men aren’t just about belonging. They’re also about how people respond to rejection and that brings me to one of the most fascinating relationships in all of comic books: Professor X and Magneto. Most people think they are opposites. Good versus evil / Hero versus villain, but they are something much more interesting. They are two different responses to the same wound. Both men have experienced fear and persecution. Both men understand what it means to be treated as less than human. Both want safety for their people. The difference is what they learned from suffering.

Professor X believes:

“If we show people our humanity, they will eventually accept us.”

Magneto believes:

“I have already seen what fear can make people do. Protect yourself first.”

Neither position comes from nowhere. Both are shaped by pain and experience. Both are attempts to answer the same question:

“How do you survive in a world that fears what you are?”

That’s what makes their conflict so enduring. It’s not really a battle of powers; it’s a battle of worldviews. It’s a battle between hope and protection, trust and vigilance, optimism and survival. Most of us have a little bit of both inside of us. Part of us wants to believe acceptance is possible and part of us remembers every time it wasn’t. That tension lives at the heart of the X-Men stories which is why the stories continue to resonate across generations.

At their core, the X-Men are not about mutants. They are about the universal human fear that if people see who we really are, they will decide we don’t belong and they are about the equally powerful hope that somewhere, somehow, we will find people who look at those same differences and say:

“You belong here.”

Not despite who you are, but because of it.

Most people think Captain America is a story about strength, but he’s not. His muscles are the least interesting thing about him. Captain America is a story about values; more specifically, Captain America is about what happens when a good person refuses to surrender their principles even when the world tells them they are naïve.

At first glance, Steve Rogers seems almost boring compared to other superheroes. Batman is haunted, Thor is a god, The Hulk is a monster, Spider-Man is overwhelmed, and Deadpool is chaos incarnate, while Steve Rogers carries a shield and tries to do the right thing… yet he remains one of the most enduring characters ever created, because his struggle is one of the most universal human struggles there is:

“Who do I become when the world pressures me to be someone else?”

Before Steve Rogers was Captain America, he was a sickly kid from Brooklyn who got beat up regularly. The super soldier serum did not create his character, but it probably revealed it. Steve wanted to stand up to bullies long before he had the strength to win. He wanted to protect people long before he had the power to do it. The muscles changed his capabilities, but they did not change his values. I think that is what separates him from many other heroes. Most superheroes are transformed by power, but Steve Rogers is defined by what remained unchanged after receiving it. Many people spend their lives trying to figure out what parts of themselves survive success, failure, loss, disappointment, and change. Steve’s answer is simple: The important parts should stay.

Captain America is also constantly portrayed as a man out of time. The world changes around him, technology changes, culture changes, politics change, institutions change, the people he loves disappear, and everything familiar vanishes. Throughout all of the changes, Steve continues asking the same question:

“What is the right thing to do?”

That sounds simple, but it’s not, because adulthood teaches us that right and easy are rarely the same thing. Doing the right thing often costs and sometimes it costs everything. That’s why conviction is difficult. People often assume courage is running into danger but sometimes courage is standing alone and sometimes courage is saying:

“No.”

No to corruption, cruelty, dishonesty, and convenient lies even when everyone around you is saying yes. That kind of courage is much harder than most people realize especially because the world has a way of wearing people down. As disappointment and betrayal accumulate and people and relationships fail, eventually many people stop believing ideals are worth fighting for. Cynicism begins to feel safer, and honestly, cynicism can feel smart, because it protects against disappointment. If you expect the worst, you rarely feel surprised, but Captain America has always represented something different: not blind optimism nor naïveté, but conviction.

There is a famous line often associated with Steve Rogers:

“When the whole world is telling you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth and tell the whole world—No, you move.”

Whether or not that’s realistic all the time is beside the point. The idea resonates because everyone eventually encounters moments where they must decide:

“Do I betray my values to make life easier?”

That’s the real battleground in Captain America stories: not the war, not the villains, and not even the shield. The battlefield is integrity.

One of the reasons Steve Rogers feels so relevant today is that he repeatedly learns that institutions are not the same thing as principles. While governments, organization, leaders, and systems fail, values still remain. Captain America isn’t loyal to authority; he’s loyal to ideals: justice, fairness, protection of the vulnerable, personal responsibility, and truth. When authority serves those ideals, he works with it and when authority violates those ideals, he opposes it. That’s why my favorite Captain America stories involve him standing against the very systems that created him, because real integrity isn’t obedience. It’s consistency and consistency becomes difficult when there is a cost attached.

That’s where Steve Rogers becomes deeply relatable. Most people are not asked to save the world, but many are asked to compromise themselves: stay quiet, look away, accept things they know are wrong, protect comfort over truth, choose belonging over honesty… the pressure is constant and Steve’s refusal to surrender himself is what makes him heroic not because he’s perfect, but because he keeps trying even after disappointment, loss, and discovering that the world is far more complicated than he hoped.

That may be the most inspiring thing about Captain America. He understands reality and sees the flaws, corruption, selfishness, and fear, and yet, he still chooses to believe people can do better… not because it’s easy, but because it’s necessary.

I don’t actually think Captain America is a superhero story. It’s a story about maintaining your character when the world keeps offering reasons to abandon it. Maybe that’s why people want to be like him. Not because people dream of having super strength, but because people hope they would still recognize themselves if everything else changed, because underneath the shield, the uniform, and the legend, Steve Rogers is asking a very human question:

“When everything around me changes, what parts of me are worth holding onto?”

And perhaps the answer is the same one he’s been giving for generations: your values… especially when they cost you something.

Wolverine is misunderstood because people think he’s a story about rage. He’s not. That’s Hulk. Wolverine is a story about survival; more specifically, Wolverine is about what happens when a person survives so much pain that they stop believing they deserve peace.

Wolverine seems like a pretty simple character. He’s tough, violent, gruff, independent, and hard to kill. The guy has metal claws and heals from almost anything. Underneath though, he’s one of the saddest characters in comic books, because Wolverine’s real power isn’t healing. It’s endurance and endurance comes with a cost. While most superheroes experience trauma, Wolverine accumulates it: decades, wars, losses, betrayals, violence, experiments, broken relationships, people he couldn’t save, and people he outlived. The character is constantly carrying history.

Why does that matter? Because one of the strangest consequences of trauma is that survival itself can become an identity. At some point, people stop asking:

“What do I want?”

And start asking:

“What do I need to do to get through this?”

Survival is incredibly useful during a crisis, but it can become a prison afterward.

Many trauma survivors become experts at enduring. They can handle stress, pain, chaos, and emergencies. They become remarkably resilient, but they often struggle with rest, joy, safety, and trust, because survival skills don’t automatically switch off when the danger passes. Meet Wolverine. The world sees him as strong, but strength is not the same thing as peace. In fact, some of the strongest people are carrying wounds nobody sees.

One of the most fascinating things about Wolverine is his healing factor. Most people view it as a superpower, but to me it feels like a curse, because every wound heals, every scar closes, and every injury disappears… except the emotional ones. The body recovers, but the memories remain. Many people eventually discover that surviving something and recovering from it are not the same thing. You can survive childhood trauma, war, abuse, addiction, grief, betrayal, and still carry the emotional imprint years later. Wolverine embodies that. He keeps moving, keeps fighting, and keeps surviving, but Trauma, memory, and what happens when pain becomes part of your identity

There is another reason I connect with Wolverine. He desperately wants connection. He just doesn’t trust it. That’s an important distinction, because people often describe Wolverine as a loner, but he repeatedly forms attachments. He mentors younger heroes, protects vulnerable people, gets hurt, and then convinces himself he was better off alone. Many trauma survivors recognize this cycle immediately. Part of them wants closeness, part of them expects loss, and part of them believes attachment inevitably ends in pain, so they develop emotional armor: sarcasm, distance, self-reliance, and isolation… not because they don’t care, but because they care deeply and caring has hurt before. Wolverine is not emotionally detached. He’s emotionally cautious.

One of the saddest themes in Wolverine’s story is that he often views himself as a weapon first and a person second. Others see a hero, but he only sees damage. Others see resilience, while he sees scars. Others see survival and he sees everything it cost. He becomes so focused on surviving that he stops recognizing his own humanity and eventually he forgets he is allowed to want more than survival. That’s Wolverine’s real journey. Not becoming stronger, tougher, or harder to kill, but learning that survival is not the same thing as living, that scars do not make someone unworthy of love, that vulnerability is not weakness, and learning that healing requires more than endurance, because endurance can carry a person through hell. but it cannot teach them how to come home afterward.

And maybe that’s why we connect to Wolverine… not because people dream of having claws and not because people dream of being indestructible, but because many people understand the fear underneath him:

“After everything I’ve survived, am I still capable of peace?”

And perhaps the most hopeful thing about Wolverine is that despite everything he has endured, despite every loss, every betrayal, every reason to shut down completely...

He keeps choosing connection… not perfectly… not consistently… but repeatedly.

Sometimes that’s what healing looks like… not becoming someone untouched by pain, but becoming someone who refuses to let pain be the final chapter.

Wonder Woman is often misunderstood because people focus on her strength, but the truth is that almost every superhero is strong. Batman is strong. Superman is strong. Thor is strong. The Hulk is strong. Strength alone is not what makes Wonder Woman special. What makes her remarkable is that she remains compassionate.

Most superhero stories are built around pain. Batman is grief. Spider-Man is responsibility. Thor is worthiness. The Hulk is suppressed rage. Deadpool is humor wrapped around suffering. Wonder Woman is something entirely different. She is a story about choosing compassion in a world that constantly gives you reasons not to.

Most people begin life believing in the best parts of humanity. We believe people are mostly good, hard work matters, love is enough, honesty wins, and kindness is rewarded, and then… life happens. People disappoint us. Relationships end. Friends betray us. Institutions fail. We experience loss. We experience injustice. We discover that good people suffer and bad people sometimes prosper. The world becomes more complicated than we expected and cynicism begins to feel safer than hope. Detachment feels safer than vulnerability. Sarcasm feels safer than sincerity. Many people spend their lives trying not to become bitter.

Wonder Woman asks a different question:

“Can you see humanity clearly and still choose to love it?”

That’s not naïveté. That’s courage. One of the things I’ve always loved about Wonder Woman is that she is both a warrior and a healer. Most heroes lean heavily toward one side. Batman solves problems through control. The Hulk solves problems through force. Thor often charges into conflict headfirst. Wonder Woman is powerful enough to dominate many of her opponents, yet her stories continually return to understanding, truth, mercy, and compassion.

Why does that matter? Because compassion is often misunderstood. People mistake compassion for weakness, kindness for passivity, and empathy for surrender, but real compassion is not the absence of strength. It is strength under control. It is choosing not to become cruel after being hurt. It is maintaining your humanity while confronting the worst parts of humanity. That is much harder than most people realize especially after enough disappointment, enough loss, and enough betrayal.

There is another reason Wonder Woman fascinates me. Her most iconic tool is not actually a weapon. It is the Lasso of Truth. Batman uses fear, Thor uses a hammer, nd Captain America uses a shield, but Wonder Woman uses truth. That feels so symbolic, because so many of our struggles ultimately come back to truth (and not comfortable truth or convenient truth). They come back to real truth: he truth about our wounds, fears, relationships, motivations, and the stories we tell ourselves.

Truth is often painful, but it is also where healing begins. You cannot heal what you refuse to acknowledge. You cannot repair what you refuse to see. You cannot change what you cannot admit. Wonder Woman’s mythology repeatedly suggests something many adults eventually learn the hard way:

Truth may hurt, but avoidance hurts longer.

That idea becomes even more powerful when you consider the world she lives in. Wonder Woman is not protected from humanity’s flaws. She sees war, violence, greed, cruelty, corruption, and loss yet she continues to believe people are capable of better… not because she is blind, but because she chooses hope anyway. Optimism is easy when life is easy but hope becomes meaningful when it survives disappointment and maybe that is why Wonder Woman endures… not because people dream of being invincible… not because people dream of being feared… not because people dream of being powerful, but because people want to believe it is possible to remain compassionate without becoming naïve, to remain strong without becoming hard, to remain truthful without becoming cruel, and to remain hopeful without denying reality.

In a world that often rewards cynicism, that may be one of the most heroic things imaginable, because the real lesson of Wonder Woman is not that strength wins. It is that strength without compassion becomes domination. Truth without compassion becomes brutality. Power without compassion becomes tyranny. Wonder Woman stands at the intersection of all three. She is a warrior who values peace, a truth-teller who values mercy, and a powerful person who never forgets her humanity.

Maybe that is her real superpower: not strength, speed, or immortality, but the courage to keep her heart open in a world that keeps giving her reasons to close it.

The Hulk is one of the most misunderstood superheroes because people think he’s a story about rage, but he’s not. He’s a story about emotional suppression so extreme that the feelings eventually become physically uncontrollable.

Bruce Banner is not afraid of monsters. Bruce Banner is afraid of himself.

The Hulk seems simple, but he’s actually a pretty complex character. He’s a giant green embodiment of anger smashing things when provoked, but underneath the destruction is something much more human… the terror of losing emotional control. Bruce Banner spends most of his life trying to contain himself: his emotions, reactions, pain, trauma, and anger, because deep down, Banner believes his emotions are dangerous.

A lot of us live this way especially trauma survivors, people raised around violence or emotional instability, and people taught that anger makes them unsafe, shameful, weak, or unlovable. We become hyper-controlled emotionally not because we feel less, but because we feel too much. Meet Bruce Banner.

Banner intellectualizes everything, but his emotion does not disappear just because it’s suppressed. It accumulates. That’s the Hulk. The Hulk is what happens when years of pain, fear, rage, helplessness, shame, and emotional overload finally break containment and honestly, I think that’s why the character connects so deeply with people who struggle with emotional regulation… not because they want to destroy things, but because they understand the fear underneath it:

“What if there’s something inside me I cannot fully control?”

That fear shapes Bruce Banner’s entire life. He isolates himself, avoids attachment, distrusts his own emotions, keeps people at a distance, and constantly monitors himself, because Banner does not experience anger as a normal human emotion. He experiences it as catastrophe.

A lot of people are never taught how to process anger safely. They are only taught two extremes: suppress it or explode with it, so anger becomes terrifying. They try endlessly to stay calm, composed, reasonable, agreeable, and emotionally controlled until eventually the pressure overwhelms the system and then everyone around them says:

“That came out of nowhere.”

But emotional explosions almost never come out of nowhere. They usually come from years of unprocessed emotion finally breaking through containment.

The fascinating thing about the character is that Hulk often expresses truths Banner cannot consciously tolerate. Banner represses while Hulk feels. Banner intellectualizes pain while Hulk externalizes it. Banner tries to stay small and controlled while Hulk becomes enormous and impossible to ignore.

I think many people have experienced versions of this internally… the part of themselves trying desperately to remain composed while the the other part is screaming:

“I cannot carry this quietly anymore.”

Many versions of Bruce Banner’s story involve childhood abuse, emotional neglect, fear, and powerlessness. Why does that matter? Because trauma often fragments identity. People create emotional compartments to survive: the functioning self, the angry self, the numb self, the caretaker self, the terrified self. Banner and Hulk symbolize emotional fragmentation made literal. One identity survives through suppression while the other survives through emotional force. Neither is fully integrated.

That’s why the most emotionally powerful Hulk stories are not really about destruction. They’re about shame. Bruce Banner fundamentally fears that if people see the full force of his emotions, they will leave, fear him, or be hurt by him.

A lot of people carry this exact same fear especially men. Many men are taught anger is the only acceptable emotion, vulnerability is weakness, sadness is shameful, fear should be hidden, and emotional overwhelm should be buried. This causes the emotional system to narrow dangerously. Pain becomes irritation. Fear becomes aggression. Shame becomes defensiveness. Grief becomes rage. And because the deeper emotions remain unprocessed, the anger intensifies.

The Hulk is not really rage itself. The Hulk is pain with nowhere safe to go.

That’s why one of the most famous Hulk lines resonates so deeply:

“That’s my secret, Cap. I’m always angry.”

People hear that line as confidence, but really, it’s devastating, because many emotionally overwhelmed people are always carrying anger underneath the surface. It isn’t explosive anger necessarily. Sometimes it’s exhaustion, resentment, fear, overstimulation, chronic stress, suppressed grief, or hypervigilance. The nervous system never fully relaxes and honestly, I think that’s why Hulk matters… Not because people fantasize about destruction, but because many people understand what it feels like to fear the intensity of their own emotions.

The real journey of Bruce Banner is not destroying the Hulk. It’s learning that emotions do not become safer through repression. Healing comes through integration, understanding, emotional honesty, and learning that anger itself is not evil. Anger is information. Sometimes it says:

“Something hurts.”
“Something feels unsafe.”
“A boundary was crossed.”
“I cannot carry this alone anymore.”

The tragedy of Bruce Banner is that he spent most of his life trying to imprison his pain instead of listening to it. Underneath his smashing is a very human fear:

“If I stop holding everything in… will I become someone dangerous?”

Deadpool is one of the most fascinating superheroes ever created because underneath all the violence, chaos, and nonstop jokes is a person in almost constant pain: physical pain, emotional pain, psychological pain, existential pain AND he never stops talking.

Deadpool is what happens when humor becomes emotional armor. Most people see Deadpool as random, immature, chaotic, vulgar, or unserious, but honestly, I think he’s one of the saddest superheroes ever written, because Wade Wilson doesn’t joke because life is easy. He jokes because silence would force him to feel everything.

A lot of people think humor is always a sign of confidence, resilience, or emotional ease and sometimes it is. Sometimes humor is joy, but sometimes humor is survival. A lot of wounded people become funny because making other people laugh creates temporary relief from pain. Humor diffuses tension and creates connection. It distracts from vulnerability and makes people feel safe. It gives social acceptance, interrupts shame, and avoids uncomfortable emotional intimacy. If someone can make other people laugh consistently enough, sometimes they never have to fully reveal how damaged they actually feel underneath. Meet Deadpool. The jokes never stop because the emotional exposure never stops either. The character is fascinating psychologically because he weaponizes absurdity against suffering itself. He turns trauma into performance, pain into entertainment, and shame into chaos.

Modern culture relates to this far more than people realize. A huge percentage of internet humor is basically collective emotional dissociation: memes, irony, self-deprecating jokes, nihilistic humor, oversharing disguised as comedy, turning burnout into jokes, turning depression into punchlines, and posting emotional collapse with laughing emojis attached. A lot of people today emotionally communicate exactly like Deadpool.

“If I make this funny enough, maybe nobody will realize how much it hurts.”

That’s an incredibly human coping mechanism. The “funny friend” archetype exists for a reason. A lot of comedians, class clowns, hyper-social people, and emotionally chaotic personalities are quietly using humor to regulate discomfort (both their own and other people’s). If everyone is laughing, things feel okay temporarily. Deadpool lives inside that emotional strategy permanently, and unlike Spider-Man, who jokes to reduce tension, Deadpool jokes because tension is his baseline emotional state. Spider-Man uses humor like relief while Deadpool uses humor like life support.

One of the most psychologically interesting things about Deadpool is that he constantly breaks the fourth wall. On the surface, it’s comedic, but symbolically, it’s fascinating. Deadpool cannot fully stay emotionally present inside his own reality, so he distances himself from it constantly. He narrates, comments, deflects, performs, and turns everything into a bit. A lot of traumatized people do something similar emotionally. They intellectualize pain, narrate their experiences instead of feeling them, turn serious moments into jokes, shift attention away from vulnerability, and keep conversations chaotic or funny so nobody gets too emotionally close. Humor creates connection, but it can also prevent intimacy.

That’s the tragedy underneath Deadpool. People enjoy being around him. They laugh and are entertained, but very few people fully reach him emotionally, because constantly performing chaos keeps people from seeing the quieter pain underneath it.

Honestly, I think that’s why Deadpool resonates so deeply with modern audiences. A lot of people are emotionally exhausted, overstimulated, burnt out, anxious, ashamed, lonely, and overwhelmed while still trying to appear entertaining, functional, and self-aware. Modern emotional survival often looks weirdly similar to Deadpool: making jokes instead of asking for help, using irony instead of vulnerability, distracting yourself constantly, laughing during emotional pain, turning suffering into content, and pretending nothing matters because caring feels dangerous. Deadpool embodies all of that, but underneath the humor is still a deeply human desire: to be accepted despite damage.

That’s what makes the character emotionally powerful. Wade Wilson is disfigured, broken, emotionally unstable, socially inappropriate, chaotic, and often self-destructive, and yet audiences still love him… not because he’s perfect, but because he represents something many people secretly fear:

“If people truly saw the full extent of my damage, would they still stay?”

Deadpool keeps joking because jokes create distance from that question, but the emotional core of the character is still the same longing underneath almost every superhero story:

To be seen fully… and not abandoned afterward.

Maybe that’s why wounded people connect to him so deeply… not because he hides pain well, but because he makes pain feel survivable long enough to keep going.

There are stories in Norse mythology about dragons, gods, warriors, and the end of the world, and then there is Gautreks Saga. This is a story that begins with a king getting lost in the woods and accidentally wandering into what may be the most psychologically unwell family in medieval literature.

At first, the saga almost feels absurd. Everyone is cheap. Everyone is terrified of waste. The family treats hospitality like a personal attack. Minor inconveniences trigger existential despair. People react to losing livestock the way modern people react to apocalyptic collapse. And then, somehow, it becomes one of the most unexpectedly human stories in the Norse tradition, because beneath the dark humor and strange exaggeration is a story about what fear does to people. It’s about scarcity, inherited thinking, survival, and about the rare person who manages to step outside of the madness they were born into. That person is Snotra.

The story begins with King Gauti, ruler of West Götaland, hunting in the forests. He becomes separated from his men and eventually stumbles upon an isolated homestead deep in the wilderness. This should already concern you in Norse literature, because nobody living alone in the woods in a saga is ever normal. The farm belongs to a man called Skafnörtung (a name essentially meaning “skinflint” or “miser”). His wife is named Tötra, meaning “rags” or “tatters.” Even before they speak, the saga is telling you exactly who these people are. This family is consumed by scarcity… not poverty necessarily, but scarcity and there is a difference. Poverty is lacking resources while scarcity thinking is the belief that any loss, no matter how small, is catastrophic.

The family is horrified that a guest has arrived because feeding him means using food. Hospitality, one of the most sacred obligations in Norse culture, is treated as a burden bordering on violence. In the middle of this chaos is their daughter, Snotra. Her name means “wise” or “intelligent,” and unlike everyone around her, she appears emotionally functional. The saga makes a point of this. She is practical, observant, and capable. She is the only person in the household who seems connected to reality.

Why does that matter? Because Gautreks Saga is ultimately a story about what happens when wisdom grows inside a house built entirely on fear.

King Gauti sleeps with Snotra, and she becomes pregnant with the child who will eventually become King Gautrek, but before that child is even born, the saga descends into one of the strangest sequences in medieval storytelling. One by one, members of the family kill themselves over trivial losses and inconveniences. Someone loses food, someone wastes effort, someone suffers a minor setback, and instead of adapting or enduring, they choose death.

Modern readers often do not know how to interpret these scenes because the tone swings wildly between comedy and horror. The events are exaggerated to the point of absurdity, but the emotional core underneath them feels recognizable. The family cannot tolerate loss (not emotionally, materially, or psychologically). Everything feels catastrophic. Every inconvenience becomes the end of the world.

While the saga plays this for dark humor, it also feels strangely modern, because once you strip away the Viking setting, this is a story about people whose fear has completely overtaken their ability to live and the result is generational collapse. The family destroys itself from the inside… all except Snotra.

Snotra survives not because she is the strongest person in the saga, but because she is the most emotionally grounded. She adapts, moves forward, and understands that survival requires flexibility. Eventually she brings her son to King Gauti’s court, where the boy is recognized as royal and raised as Gautrek and this is where the story becomes brilliant, because Gautrek grows into the exact opposite of the family Snotra came from. He becomes famous for generosity. Not for greed, hoarding, nor fear, but for generosity.

That contrast is not accidental. In Norse society, gift-giving was not just kindness; it was social glue. Kings were expected to reward loyalty, feed guests, support followers, and create bonds through generosity. A stingy ruler was seen as morally defective, so Gautrek becoming generous is more than a personality trait. It is the breaking of a cycle. He is the child of a family destroyed by scarcity thinking who grows into a man known for abundance.

There are no dragons in this part of Gautreks Saga. There are no great battles or supernatural horror. The monster in the story is fear and specifically the fear that there will never be enough: food, security, control, certainty. That fear turns people inward and isolates them. It makes generosity feel dangerous and connection feel costly.

The family at the beginning of the saga cannot survive because they see every human interaction as depletion and that view makes the story less ridiculous and more familiar. What amazes me about Gautreks Saga is that it understands something modern psychology constantly circles back to: People who cannot tolerate loss cannot adapt to life.

Life requires adaptation. Things go wrong. Resources disappear. Plans fail. People disappoint us. The future changes shape constantly. The people who survive are not always the strongest. Often they are simply the people capable of adjusting without emotionally collapsing. That is Snotra’s real gift: not intelligence alone, but resilience. She survives a household consumed by fear and raises the person who finally escapes it and somehow, hidden inside one of the weirdest sagas ever written, is a profoundly human idea: Sometimes the greatest act of rebellion is refusing to inherit the emotional poverty you were born into.

The Place Where Family History Turns Into Myth

Long before castles rose in England… before the Towneleys held land in Lancashire…
before Norman knights crossed the Channel… the old stories say there was Gauti and beside him, in some whispered strands of memory and myth, stood Snotra.

Whether they were truly historical people no one can now say with certainty. Their world exists beyond reliable records, in the dim territory where oral tradition, tribal memory, and mythology begin to overlap, but in the old Scandinavian imagination, they represented something important enough to survive.

The old Norse traditions remember Gauti not merely as a man, but almost as an origin itself. His name is tied to the Geats the ancient northern people later echoed in the world of Beowulf. In the old stories, the Geats were fierce, sea-bound, proud, and deeply tied to the harsh landscapes of Scandinavia. The name Gauti itself became associated with tribal ancestry, kingship, and the shaping of identity.

Some traditions even blur Gauti into the many names and titles connected to Odin, who was sometimes called Gautr “father of the Geats.” The strange thing about ancient lineage traditions is that the farther back they reach, the less they distinguish between king, ancestor, hero, and god. To later generations, Gauti became more than an individual. He became the remembered father standing at the beginning of the people themselves.

If Gauti represented origin, Snotra represented understanding. Her name survives in Old Norse meaning wise, intelligent, prudent, and refined. In later Norse mythology, Snotra appears among the lesser-known goddesses associated with wisdom, restraint, courtesy, and proper conduct. Unlike many mythological women remembered for beauty or tragedy, Snotra’s defining trait was thoughtfulness which alone feels unusual and strangely powerful. The old stories do not give us dramatic battles or grand adventures connected to her. Instead, she survives almost like an idea: wisdom carried forward through memory and perhaps that is why she remained attached to ancestral tradition. In ancient societies where survival depended on judgment as much as strength, wisdom itself became sacred.

I imagine stories of Gauti and Snotra not written in books, but spoken aloud in great timber halls while winter storms battered the dark outside… before monasteries… before written chronicles… before genealogy charts.

A fire burning. Voices repeating names. Children learning where they came from through story.

That is how people survived culturally before they survived historically. The old Norse world understood something modern people often forget: identity lives in memory first. A lineage was not simply biology. It was inheritance of values, belonging, courage, wisdom, and continuity. Gauti and Snotra endured because generations chose to keep saying their names.

Supposedly, Snotra and Guati are my 47th great-grandparents. At least, that’s what the sprawling medieval genealogies and Scandinavian lineage charts claim. How do we prove who they are? We can’t. Modern people often want ancient genealogy to behave like modern documentation: birth certificates, census records, and exact dates, but the oldest ancestral traditions were never built that way. The purpose of ancient genealogy was not merely to record facts. It was to preserve meaning.

And so figures like Gauti and Snotra exist in a strange twilight: possibly historical, possibly mythologized, possibly symbolic, and perhaps all three at once. No historian can fully untangle where memory ends and mythology begins, but maybe that uncertainty is part of the beauty, because the oldest stories were never meant to survive as perfect records. They survived because human beings kept telling them.

I cannot say with certainty that Gauti and Snotra existed exactly as the old genealogies describe them… no responsible historian could, but I understand why people preserved them. Gauti represents origin while Snotra represents wisdom. Together they stand at the edge of remembered ancestry like archetypes carried through centuries of oral tradition: the ancient father, the wise mother, and the beginning of the story before history itself fully begins. Somehow, through countless generations of migration, war, religion, marriage, loss, and reinvention, their names survived long enough to eventually appear in my own family line. Whether as history or mythology… that feels remarkable enough on its own.

My next article shares their mythical story: Gautreks Saga.

Writer’s Note

The figures of Gauti and Snotra exist within the overlapping worlds of Scandinavian oral tradition, mythological literature, and later medieval genealogical reconstruction. The oldest Norse genealogies often blend legendary ancestors, tribal founders, historical memory, and mythic symbolism.

This piece is therefore written not as definitive historical proof, but as an exploration of how ancient people preserved identity, ancestry, and cultural meaning through story long before modern historical documentation existed.

There are people who wear clothing and then there are people who weaponize aesthetics until they stop looking entirely human. Luisa Casati was absolutely the second type. Most people remember her as the woman with the smeared black eyes, ghost-white skin, pet cheetahs on diamond leashes, and enough theatricality to make modern influencers look restrained. History turned her into a kind of beautiful fever dream: The eccentric marchesa. The living artwork. The woman wandering Venice at midnight looking like she escaped from a gothic hallucination.

And honestly… she is those things, but I think reducing her to “rich weird lady” misses the mark. Luisa Casati was building herself and not casually: deliberately, aggressively, and almost desperately. I think a lot of us understand that impulse more than we will admit… Especially those of us who have ever been afraid of disappearing.

Casati famously said:

“I want to be a living work of art.”

People repeat it because it sounds glamorous and dramatic, but if you sit with that and think, it’s actually a little disturbing. A painting cannot relax. A sculpture doesn’t get to have an off day. Art is always being looked at: judged and consumed. To turn yourself into art means giving up the ability to simply exist without observation.

I think Casati understood. She built herself into spectacle because spectacle creates memory, memory creates myth, and myth survives. If people stared long enough, maybe they would never forget her. And honestly? For women especially, that matters more than people like to admit.

Women disappear from history constantly, not because they lacked intelligence or creativity or force of personality, but because history traditionally preserved women in relation to men: who they married, who they birthed, and who wrote about them afterward. Meanwhile countless brilliant women vanished into footnotes, unnamed portraits, burned letters, or passing references in someone else’s story. I honestly think Luisa Casati understood that on a primal level, so instead of asking to be remembered, she made herself impossible to ignore.

Men built statues while Luisa Casati became one and suddenly the cheetahs make a little more sense. So do the gowns, candles, theatrics, and impossibly exaggerated appearance. People remember images. People remember mythology. People remember women who rupture expectation so violently they cannot be filed away quietly afterward.

What fascinates me most is how modern she feels, because she understood something we still wrestle with now: Identity is performative. It’s not fake or dishonest, but performative. Everyone does it: work self, confident self, funny self, unbothered self, desired self … most people just do it subtly, but Casati did it by walking into rooms looking like an eldritch Victorian vampire queen. It was the same instinct in a different century. Society rewards people who become symbols not people who remain messy and complicated. The moment someone becomes visually unforgettable, people stop asking whether maintaining that identity is survivable.

We still have these people: celebrities, influencers, online personalities, and even regular people crafting digestible versions of themselves online: curated vulnerability,
personal branding, main character energy, and turning your life into something aesthetically understandable. We act like this is some horrifyingly modern phenomenon created by social media, but it isn’t. Luisa Casati was basically doing it in candlelit Venice a hundred years ago. The platform may have changed, but the hunger didn’t.

The ending of her story is heartbreaking. She spent almost all of her enormous fortune creating herself as myth and somehow… it worked. People still talk about her. Artists still paint versions of her. Designers still reference her silhouette. Photographers still chase her ghost.

She achieved the thing most people never do, she became unforgettable, but becoming a symbol has a cost. Performance consumes people especially when the performance is you and maybe that’s the contradiction sitting at the center of Luisa Casati:

She transformed herself into art because she understood women are forgotten and she refused to be.

Thor is one of the most interesting superheroes because underneath all the lightning, muscles, and godhood, his story is fundamentally about identity, or more specifically: Thor is about what happens when someone who has always been valued for strength suddenly loses certainty about who they are without it.

Thor seems like a pretty straight forward superhero. He’s powerful, confident, charismatic, a warrior, a prince… a god, but Thor’s best stories are actually about humiliation, insecurity, grief, failure, and emotional maturity NOT superhero powers. Thor constantly loses things that define him. He loses his throne, his father, his home, his brother, his status, his certainty, his hammer, and his sense of purpose. Every time he lose something, the story asks us..

“Who are you when the thing that made you feel powerful disappears?”

Who hasn’t had this fear. A lot of people build identities around external roles: provider, parent, protector, attractive person, successful person, strong person, useful person, needed person… and then life eventually removes one of those identities. A divorce happens. A career collapses. A body changes. A loved one dies. A marriage ends. An injury happens. A layoff comes. Depression arrives. Suddenly people are left staring at themselves asking:

“If I’m not that anymore… then who am I?”

Thor experiences this constantly, but one of the most important parts of Thor story is that he doesn’t just struggle with strength or worthiness. He struggles with inheritance. Thor grows up in the shadow of Odin, an impossibly powerful father figure whose legacy defines the entire world around him.

Thor is not only asking himself:

“Am I strong enough?”

He’s asking:

“Will I ever become enough to deserve the legacy I inherited?”

A lot of people grow up under the weight of expectations they never consciously chose: family legacies, military families, successful parents, religious expectations, generational pressure, cultural ideas about masculinity, or simply the feeling that you are supposed to become something larger than yourself, and no matter how accomplished they become, they still feel measured against someone else’s standard.

That’s Thor.

He is literally raised in the hall of gods by a father who conquered worlds, commands absolute authority, and seems emotionally immovable. Odin represents certainty, authority, legacy, power, and expectation. Thor spends much of his life trying to earn the approval of a figure who already feels larger than life.

That creates something many of us can relate to: the child who becomes high-performing because they are desperate to feel worthy in the eyes of someone they admire and honestly, I think that’s why Thor’s arrogance early on is interesting too. Arrogance is often insecurity wearing armor.

Thor initially performs certainty because uncertainty feels unbearable. He rushes into battle, acts impulsively, overcompensates with bravado, and needs to prove himself constantly, because underneath all of it is fear:

“What if I’m not the man everyone expects me to be?”

That fear becomes even more painful once Odin dies, because once the larger-than-life parent is gone, there’s nobody left to measure yourself against externally… the expectation now lives inside you and that’s when many people realize they spent years chasing approval without ever developing a stable sense of self underneath it.

That’s why the Thor’s hammer matters too. Mjölnir isn’t just a weapon. It’s worthiness made physical. The hammer literally asks:

“Are you still worthy of power?”

How many people secretly tie their worth to performance?

Am I still worthy if I fail?
If I lose my status?
If I’m depressed?
If I’m weak?
If I can’t provide?
If I disappoint people?
If I fall apart?

Thor’s fear is not weakness itself. It’s loss of identity. Honestly, I think that’s why the character became far more exciting once writers allowed him to fail openly. Early Thor was mostly mythology, but modern Thor feels human. He grieves… spirals… drinks… avoids pain through humor… struggles with shame… loses confidence… and questions himself constantly. Unlike Batman, who responds to trauma by becoming more rigid, Thor often responds emotionally first and thinks later. Thor is not emotionally controlled. He’s emotionally overwhelmed which honestly makes sense for someone whose entire identity was built around strength and certainty.

A lot of men quietly experience this too. Many are taught to be strong, be capable, be useful, protect people, don’t cry, don’t fail, and don’t look weak, but life eventually breaks everyone’s certainty somehow and when identity is built entirely around strength, vulnerability can feel annihilating.

That’s part of why Thor’s grief hits so hard in later stories. He loses almost everything:
his family, his home, his people, his brother, his confidence and suddenly the god who once believed he could solve everything with power is forced to confront helplessness.

That’s devastating, because helplessness is one of the hardest human emotions to tolerate… especially for protectors… especially for caretakers… and especially for people who built identities around being “the strong one.”

Thor’s real evolution is not becoming stronger than Odin. It’s learning that worthiness cannot come entirely from inherited expectations, titles, power, or proving himself to others.

At some point, he has to decide who he is outside the shadow of his father’s mythology and honestly, I think that’s one of the most universal human struggles there is. Not becoming powerful, but becoming yourself. Maybe that’s why Thor resonates so deeply, not because people want to become gods, but because they understand the fear underneath him:

“If I stop being who everyone expects me to be… will there still be anything worthy left underneath?”

Spider-Man may be the most realistic superhero ever created because his real enemy is not villains. It’s exhaustion. Peter Parker is constantly behind on rent, emotionally overwhelmed, sleep deprived, guilty, over-committed, trying to save everyone, disappointing people he loves, and blaming himself for things no human being could realistically control. In other words: Spider-Man is just adulthood in a mask.

While Batman feels mythological and Superman feels symbolic, Peter Parker feels like someone answering text messages while quietly having a nervous breakdown in a grocery store parking lot. To be honest, this feels so relatable right now. My husband is gone for the month, and lately I’ve found myself connecting to Spider-Man … not because I have superpowers, but because of the pressure and the constant feeling that everyone needs something from me all the time.

Questions. Problems. Responsibilities. Emotional labor. Planning. Communication.
Support. Crisis management.

NEED!!! NEED!!! NEED!!!

The most difficult part is that when you become competent, dependable, and capable, people stop seeing the cost of that capability. They just see the function. This is Spider-Man’s constant experience. The city needs him. His friends need him. His family needs him. Work needs him. Strangers need him. AND no matter how much he gives, somebody is still disappointed in him. He’s late. He misses things. He drops balls. He fails people accidentally. He struggles financially. He loses relationships. He disappoints people he genuinely loves. BUT he still keeps trying. That’s what I connect to… not his powers, but his endurance.

One of the most interesting things about Spider-Man is that his powers don’t actually solve his main problem. His problem is over-responsibility and his powers actually make that worse, because once Peter realizes he can help people, guilt makes it emotionally impossible for him not to. That’s the real psychological meaning behind Uncle Ben’s death. “With great power comes great responsibility” is not just moral advice. It becomes Peter Parker’s emotional operating system.

If he rests, he feels guilty.
If he prioritizes himself, someone suffers.
If he cannot save everyone, he feels ashamed.
If someone gets hurt, he internalizes responsibility immediately.

That is an exhausting way to exist, but honestly, I think a lot of us quietly live this way, especially caretakers, parents, trauma survivors, women, and neurodivergent people who became hyper-capable out of survival. We become “the reliable one”, the person who handles things, the one people call, the one who figures it out, and the emotional infrastructure holding everything together. Eventually your own humanity starts disappearing underneath everyone else’s needs.

That’s why Spider-Man stories hurt emotionally. Peter Parker is always sacrificing pieces of himself to keep other people afloat. Sleep. Relationships. Money. Peace. Rest. Identity. Joy. AND unlike Batman or Superman, Peter doesn’t even get the dignity of looking composed while suffering. He’s messy. Late. Overwhelmed. Emotionally reactive. Trying to joke through stress. Running on fumes. Dropping things constantly.

This honestly makes him feel more human than almost any superhero ever written. Also, its important to consider that Spider-Man never wanted this life. Batman chose the mission and Superman embraces responsibility as identity, Peter Parker gets thrown into it accidentally. Why does this matter? Because many adults didn’t consciously choose to become over-responsible people either. Sometimes life simply hands us too much and once we become capable of carrying weight, people start handing us more of it.

That’s Spider-Man: a person slowly crushed by responsibility while still trying to remain kind and that might be why we love him so much… not because he’s powerful, but because he keeps showing up exhausted.

Most adults are not trying to become gods. They’re just trying not to collapse while everyone keeps needing things from them.