My Superpower

This post is prompted by a TV episode from a new series (and season 2 has been approved! yay!) called The Irrational which centers around a main character who is a psychologist often called in to consult on criminal investigations. One thing I appreciate about the series is that the main character devotes as much effort into addressing the emotional impact and responses of everyone involved in the crime being investigated and not just the perpetrator.

It turns out that the investigation in this episode is the result of the main character being the victim of horrific burns suffered during a terrorist bombing of a church. Another person who has suffered similar injuries believing that they caused the event which also resulted in the death of another person. While acting as a grief counselor, it's determined that arson had been committed and an investigation ensues. The perpetrator is identified and apprehended, but not before the perpetrator locked the main character inside a burning building, prompting him to revisit his memories of the bombing.

The poignant moment occurs when the main character is visiting the burn victim afterwards, and he confesses that his goal had been to try and give the burn victim hope. But that was wrong, and his choice had been prompted by his own unwillingness to go back and revisit his own memories and the reality was that even after 20 years, he still had a long way to go to reaching some level of closure. 

So the reality was that he didn't have much to offer in terms of giving her hope, because what had happened had been so horrific. But he's survived. And he blurts out: "It's like my superpower."

That scene had a lot of emotional resonance for me. It'll be eleven years ago in about 5 weeks when my life was irrevocably changed when someone came up behind me in the park and plunged a box cutter into my neck severing the anterior branch of my carotid.

Before that event, I used to be anxious about a lot of things. But surviving that has led to a sense of being indestructible (though I definitely feel the effects of aging). The night I was attacked, I was wearing a black fleece that they cut off my body in the operating room. Even though just about every piece of clothing I was wearing was cut off (and I remember thinking: "I just got these pants!") and eventually returned. Everything was blood stained, including the fleece, but for some reason I stitched the fleece back together by hand, washed it, and kept wearing it until the fleece was eventually misplaced (and it will pain me until death that I lost it). It was like that black fleece was like Kevlar and wearing helped contribute to a sense of invulnerability. I can't help but wonder if the misplacement of that fleece was an event designed to prompt me to acknowledge my mortality.