SuperYou

Two weeks ago in one of my classes, stemming from their weekly journaling, my students had an incredibly generative conversation about how we struggle to be in service to ourselves, and what ways we might improve. I left the building that day flying, feeling so profoundly lucky to be able to sit in a room with these 6 young people, hear them, see them, and offer them ways to be more kind to themselves and consequently their collaborators, within the context of theater making.

Building on this work, in last week’s class I decided to flip the script from struggle to success, and asked them to journal on their “superpowers.” I asked them to take our allotted 10 minutes to write about all the things they are great at, acknowledging that sometimes superpowers have painful origin stories, but are superpowers nonetheless.

When our 10 minutes ended and I asked them to share, something happened which has never happened all semester with this group: everyone was silent. No one wanted to speak up. If you’ve ever been in a room with 6 theater kids, you’ll understand how disturbing this is.

I eventually got them to open up by talking about why it is that it is so much harder to talk about what we are good at, versus what we struggle with. Why does it feel so “cringy” as one student put it. We discussed the currency of self-deprecation, how influencer culture propagates the performance of identity versus actual embodiment of self, and how “bragging” gets erroneously conflated with the open hearted awareness of the attributes you possess, which may be used to serve others.

So these next couple of weeks - as we in the United States stand on the precipice of a new era - I ask you to sit for a few minutes, and jot down your superpowers, without reservation and without judgment. You will be of greater service to yourself and to the world if you know and name your powers, so that you may share them.

And if you have the time and the energy, maybe offer yourself a superhero self portrait while you’re at it…