Often super powers are the result of some kind of traumatic event. Mine is no exception. I am pretty sure it started to develop when, at the age of 6, I got Bells Palsy. For those of you who are not familiar with Bells Palsy, let me fill you in. It's pretty awesome. Half of your face gets paralyzed, so you can't smile, close one eye, or drink all that properly because you can't use half of your mouth, so anything you drink trickles out all over your face. My mom had to tape my eye shut every night.
Young kids don't usually get Bells Palsy, and they definitely don't often get it 3 times like I did. Usually, it happens for a bit, then goes away. But I guess because I was lucky enough to get it 3 times, a bit of paralysis hung around. I still can't blow up balloons properly, and I regularly get asked why my smile is crooked. Every time someone takes my picture, I use a very practiced smile that doesn't show off my crooked face.
Now, as you can imagine, having a crooked-half paralyzed face in elementary school opens up a playground of jokes. Some of my favourites were "You look like you smoked a cigar on one side of your face for too long", and the obvious name calling, "PopEye the Sailor Man", and they weren't talking about my muscles. (It's okay if you want to laugh here, it is actually making me laugh right now too).
So, somewhere along the way, I realized that if I made fun of myself first, it didn't hurt so bad when someone else made fun of me! Plus, if I beat them to the punch, it would be sort of redundant for them to say it again. Took all the fun out of calling me PopEye! I believe this is a pretty rad coping strategy, and has worked well for most of my life. I'm pretty sure it helped me to earn my Class Clown, and "Most likely to be in a Mentos commercial" titles.
The problem is, I've lost control of my power, and now it is coming out all over the place! Which is a problem during, say, a job interview where instead of saying all the things I am good at, I automatically say all the areas I need to improve on! Or instead of saying all the great things I've done the past year, I talk about the thing that required the least of me?! Somehow I have to reign my powers in before tragedy strikes. I mean, we all know what happened when Peter Parker took advantage of his SpiderMan powers!! (Well, most of us do. If you don't, sorry about that. Just imagine something bad happening)
In fact, I've probably gone and done it again. Considering I am about to post to the world that my face is crooked. Well, guess I won't need to use my fake smile in pictures anymore. Sweet.
