My earliest memory is of lying in a crib, watching a spider descend on a single thin strand, feeling its legs on my cheek, then feeling a warm, piercing sting.
I can’t possibly really remember that, but when I was a baby, I was bitten on the face by a poisonous spider. My mother- and briefly our doctor- thought it would kill me. Obviously it didn’t. This was the second time in my very early life that people were certain I’d die. My mother had an incredibly long and painful labor, and I came out of her womb with the cord that had sustained my life for nine months tied around my mouth. I was blue when I was born, and my face was purple after that spider bit me.
The earliest memory I have that is one I believe is mine and not from a story is of being about three years old and running over my mother’s foot on my Spider-man Big Wheel. I remember it because it’s the first time I can recall hurting anyone, but that Spider-Man Big Wheel, I came to find out, only came into my life after me and the neighbor’s child took to tossing our Big Wheels over the fence to trade. My father had purchased the one he would have wanted– the Hulk. I wanted Spider-Man.
I’m sharing that story today because I want to talk a bit about what we want to be, what we try to be, and what we ultimately become. Some of this will seem familiar if you’ve read all 164 of my other posts here, but let’s be honest– only Julie has read each of these without fail, unless someone is doing research on me. In which case, hi, creepy spying person who is reading all my blogs in a sitting. I hope you like being bored!
Back to my point: we all dream of being something special when we grow up. I know there’s that rare person who claims they didn’t, but it’s okay, that person can lie to herself. I don’t mind. It’s our nature to want to be more than we are. For me, early in life, it was very much about spiders. I was terrified of them. But I also found them fascinating. One of them is the source of the Cherokee creation myth. Spider-Man was my favorite hero until I became all Batman obsessed as a tween. And why not? I was bitten by a spider just like him. Peter Parker had a hard time not being a nerd who caught bad breaks, like me. And his costume was awesome. I was particularly fond of the black outfit that became Venom. I have a signed copy of the first cover to feature that suit on the wall of my home office. So when I was young, I wanted to be Spider-Man.
Then I realized I couldn’t be Spider-Man, so I wanted to create stories about heroes like Spider-Man. I was obsessed with Todd McFarlane’s artwork (I also have an autographed poster of his Spider-Man #1 poster on my home office wall, btw). I wanted to be a comic artist and writer.
I gave up on art, as I’ve said in other posts here, because my art teacher mentor told me to go do something more valuable with my life. That was horrible advice and no one should ever tell you that.
So I fell back on the common thread of all the things I loved as a child, the sort of core of my Cherokee mother’s cultural understanding and the way I (and really all of us) address the world: storytelling. I went to college because there wasn’t a future for a poor kid working at Wal-Mart (don’t remind me that by this age I would probably run a whole district for the Wal-Mart machine and be making a lot of money– I wanted to have a soul). When I started school I wanted to tell stories and bring about social justice.
I almost went to law school after my undergrad (I have an adviser at Berkeley to thank for my leaving Law– he was an amazing person with a passing resemblance to Morpheus from the Matrix), but I ended up pursuing my love for telling stories. It turns out that when you love stories and games and comics and meaning making and social justice, you’re actually a rhetorician. And so I earned two degrees in rhetoric, and I became Dr. Phill, a branding choice that should clearly ring to you as the opening move of someone who knows that people would make “Dr. Phil” jokes, so I just took up ownership.
There’s that old adage: those who can, do. Those who can’t teach. That’s bullshit, by the way, but if you want to be a creator of stories, it should ring: those who get lucky and find the Joss Whedon career path do, those who don’t get so lucky sustain their love of the art by sharing their knowledge with others. Teaching is what I’m good at and what I’m meant to do. So I tried to settle into a career as an English professor.
A final problem with wanting to be an English professor: those who do are territorial and can be, at times, close-minded. if you study Persepolis or Maus (or something even more avant garde) you’re worthy of studying “comics” as an English scholar, but if you study Batman and Superman, it’s lowbrow. If you study games, and you’re James Gee who had a career as a linguist first, you get respect, but if you’re a gamer who expands on those ideas, you’re not doing “real” work. If you illustrate that you care about race, gender and class but involve it in your work only in ways that ultimately reaffirms the status quo, you’re regarded with respect. If you rattle cages and insist on talking about things that can be really uncomfortable, like how “redskin” is a term used to identify the things white people scalped for a nominal fee– people tend to not embrace you.
So in the end…
I’ve become the sum total of the things I wanted to be. I’m about to sign a contract to become an official “real boy” in academia, an Assistant Professor of Games and Simulations in a college of Creative Arts (back to being labeled, properly I think, as an artist). I can’t spin webs or climb buildings, but I get to be the ever-loved friendly neighborhood social justice warrior. And I get to make stories and games and teach other people to make stories and games. I get to do the work of being a creative and of being critical, and I get to help people and open minds. I get to make knowledge. Think about the power of that. I get to tell stories that MAKE knowledge.
It was far from a straight line, and I often envy the people I grew up with, like the one who wanted to be a cop and went from high school to an associates degree in criminal justice to the police academy to being a cop or the one who wanted to open a hair salon that went from vocational school to working at a salon to managing a salon to taking a loan and opening her own salon. I am happy for those folks– truly happy. But I was always jealous that being me meant a lot more stop-and-start and so many more curves and swerves. We all see our own story as being more of a struggle than most others, I’m sure, but I can document the times when it felt like I was pushing a boulder up the hill and sliding down with my feet dug in just to push again. I faced my share of Greens Goblin and Doctors Octopai. I knew more than one Dr. Connors who turned into a violent lizard. My clothes never crawled onto a rival and came to try to kill me, but I faced more than one craven hunter.
I am not claiming it was horrible. It wasn’t. It was just a life to this point. Some of it was really hard. Some of it came easy. I had great friends and have gotten great support, but I also suffered my share of betrayals.
the point is, I got up. Any time I fell down, no matter how slow, no matter how painfully, I got back up.
I have a problem with the tendons in the leg I broke when I was five. As a result, I have pretty serious plantar issues. For a while, I saw a chiropractor. If you’ve seen me in the physical world, you know I’m large. Men my size don’t usually move fast. After one session of him violently beating my foot (in a good way, but let’s not pretend it wasn’t basically tendon torture for the greater good), he watched me sit down to put on my shoes then pop right back to my feet. He told me about an article he’d read that said the #1 indicator of a long life and of strong health is how quickly you can pop up from sitting on the floor to standing.
As he told me that, I couldn’t help but think “that’s my super power. I get back up. Fast. And I keep moving.”
I’ll leave you today with another Run the Jewels lyric that could be a good life mantra:
What, me worry? Nah buddy, I’ve lost before, so what? You don’t get it. I’m dirt, motherfucker, I can’t be crushed.
Until next time, don’t flash weak shit to the Shark Tank judge, kids.
Just do you.