My superpower is that I'm expendable.
I was never the smartest kid or the most interesting kid.... I just tried really really hard at the thing that would get people to like me. It was only a matter of time before I figured out that people would like me if I do the thing others won't do: sacrifice.
In college, I made my carefree friends laugh with my superpower by being on top of their moving car making zombie sounds and slapping their windshield. Willing to win an award for funniest death.
When I got a job, I made my employers like me by giving up all social life and needing very little sleep. Still envisioning fantasies of sacrificing my life if terrorists ever invaded the building. Eventually when I became a boss, I continued to sacrifice in secret while touting values of work life balance... all to protect others from the bad things about this industry and all to ensure that the team continues to like having me as their boss. The effort to keep up with these demands meant my wife had to take the brunt of being present in the home and paying attention to things such as house repair services, childcare, and date planning. My sacrifice at work caused my wife to sacrifice at home... and sometimes, her work.
I quit my company last September after 10 years as an owner in order to become a full time homemaker. I needed to shift my energy from being a superboss to being a better parent and a better husband that doesn't leave all of the mental labor to my wife. Multitasking has never been a strength of mine, and working until 2am to run a game studio did not seem to move the needle with a wife that makes more than twice as much money as me and children that are over the whole "my dad makes video games" thing.
The only superpower I know how to have is sacrifice; it is my entire identity. I have lived my life up to this point as if I had nothing to lose by giving more than 110%. If things ever got really bad, I would just make sure every part of me was useful to somebody who deserved it more than I did.
But kids create a logical conflict to this mode of operation. I can't just spend myself until there is nothing left because that makes me less useful to them and creates a problem that others would have to solve. My lack of presence did harm to them. The expectation of presence... I want to believe that the family would be better off without me, but I know that won't be true. They may have been better off if I didn't exist, but reality doesn't work that way. The only truth that works is that they would be better off if I was a different person. In a sense, it works better to kill the person you are on the inside because the body can host a completely different person without anyone noticing. Each version of me has the superpower of being expendable.
Somebody asked what I do for myself, and I honestly could not answer. My whole thing was to deplete myself early and die young. I wasn't supposed to make it this far.
The current occupant of this body has no career because it could not see a path that didn't involve pain for those within reach. Instead, it currently lives a life concerned with cooking, growing humans, and cleaning inside a toaster with a tiny brush. I do find bits of joy in maintaining kitchen knives and managing kitchen logistics as if this were a restaurant documentary, but I'm largely invisible compared to the life I had before. As a game developer, I had a thing that I could say at my wife's work gatherings with other grownups. Now, nobody will notice that there are less crumbs inside the toaster or that our knives can cut a tomato sideways... nor do they care.
I don't know how to use my superpower in this current form. I simply exist in the background while my body double takes over. The me that I used to know has lost his way. No longer trying to do anything in particular. No longer working towards some future where my special gifts are supposed to pay off in some big way. Instead, I linger in that space after the movie once the credits are done rolling.
I guess this is how my story ends.
