I loved superheroes as a boy because superheroes are allowed to punch. Their fury is righteous. They spoke to me from the pages of comic books I would read, by myself, in the backseat of the family car, while it was parked in the driveway. No one ever thought to look for me there. I was safe from parents, siblings, and supervillains.
Superheroes explained the world to me at the same time it was being explained to me by uncles, coaches, neighbors, and men on screens, big and small. Fight. Do not cry. If you can’t be brave, get mad.
Life is pain, and the only way to avoid that pain is to scream and karate chop it right in the throat.
The best defense against complicated feelings is a snarling offense. Show your teeth. Attack! Do not share your dreams or joys with anyone. Do not trust anyone with your softness. Hide your joys behind barbed wire. Life is pain, and the only way to avoid loss and regret is to never love or risk happiness in the first place.
Superheroes speak the two languages all boys know. The first language is violence. The second is anger. These lessons have been passed down from father to son for generations. They are meant to make boys strong, and strength is a foundational virtue of masculinity.
Far too often, though, boys are taught to merely pretend to be strong. We learn to substitute the unpredictability of vulnerability with the anxiety-soothing simplicity of naked wrath. And then these boys grow up to become men who love superheroes.
I am one of those men.
I read comic books. I watch superhero movies. Those big-budget cape-and-cowl action flicks are wishes come true. That wish is, of course, that life was less complex. That humans didn’t need each other as much as we do. If I were a superhero, I could use telekinesis, or magnetism, or super-strength, to put a broken heart back together instead of crushing the shards in my fist in a fit of rage and bleeding.
I have learned, recently, that insulting superheroes, or superhero movies, on social media will earn you a passionate defense from those who love superheroes. This defense will probably be emotional and, likely, personal. If you do make the mistake of criticizing superheroes — even if it is a superficial opinion — you are a villain, and justice must be served. If all men had god-like powers, the world would be reduced to ruin because of hurt feelings. At least we’d be able to sit in the debris, alone. When I am alone, no one can love me. I suppose this is why I spend so much time on social media.
Men are lonely. I am lonely. Batman is lonely. Sometimes he looks up at the bat signal and thinks, “Commissioner Gordon is thinking about me.” I mean, his parents are dead. Every superhero’s secret identity is a quiet, withdrawn boy, terrified of his own sadness. Batman spends his nights fighting crime because, otherwise, he’d spend those nights in a cave full of echoes.
Iron Man is lonely. Anger is armor. He’s a human oyster — the shell gives him shape and purpose. Without it, he’s just a quivering tablespoon of meat and tears. Aquaman talks about his fears to fish. Captain America hides behind his shield.
Superman is an alien so lonely that he built a home far away from other people. His whole homeworld is dead. He named this fortress after his loneliness. He spends his days there waiting to be of use to someone, anyone, because unless the world is in crisis, what’s the point of Superman? He’s just Clark Kent, a man who no one can ever truly know.
The Avengers aren’t lonely until they go home — to their penthouses, sanctums, and apartments in Queens. They take off their masks and boots, wondering what the others are doing. When they’re together, when they’re a team, they punch and make jokes and get angry at aliens. But they never stop, make eye contact, and ask each other, “How are you feeling?”
Daredevil crouches on rooftops, alone. Superheroes crouch on rooftops a lot. It’s solitary work, getting fired up about wrongdoing and punching, punching, always punching, maybe a roundhouse kick here or there.
But I was never lonely when I was with The Flash, Hawkman, or Thor. They understood me, as a boy, because all boys are scared and spilling over with feelings and confusion, and superheroes are strong.
Iceman is covered in ice. He can freeze rivers and create glacier-like walls. I liked him, for obvious reasons: My anger is ice. But he wasn’t my favorite. The character I couldn’t get enough of was The Fantastic Four’s Thing, a hulking monster made out of marmalade-colored rocks, who is strong and angry. He finds love with a woman who is blind, and that is nice. But he’ll always be a living geode, a cigar-chomping boulder filled with glittering quartz crystals that no one ever sees.
Another superhero I connected with was Silver Surfer, the cosmic sojourner who broods over the world with shimmering sadness in his empty silver eyes.
Once, for a summer, I created superhero identities for myself and my younger brother. He and I used to fight. I, partly, blame nature. I used to fight with my older sister, too, but I was outmatched. I was a beast, constantly unmoored by emotions I couldn't understand or control, and she was smart. It was far too easy to trick me into running into the basement. Every time this happened, I’d make it halfway down the stairs before hearing the click of the basement door lock.
She locked me in the damp, dark basement often, without breaking a sweat.
But my brother and I were two monkeys fighting over a single banana. So I brokered a short-lived compromise: I would become The Whippersnapper and he, The Young Whippersnapper, and our weapons were long willow branches that our imaginations would transform into bullwhips. The Zorro Brothers! We would shout and punch, as a team, and it was a love song, even though our mother told us to quiet down.
Maybe, one day, I can tell my brother how much I miss fighting bushes, trees, and other assorted backyard evils with him.
I was a lonely boy. As a consequence, I am a lonely man. I am lonely because I am not strong. I have no superpowers except for seething, and pushing people away, and isolating myself for entire weekends. But I do have a weakness. Every superhero has a weakness, like kryptonite or bullets.
My weakness is telling, and showing, those I love that I love them. I want to shoot laser beams out of my eyes and carve a trench around me, a wide moat, that no one can jump, not even my therapist, who wants me to reach out to friends and family and ask, “How are you doing?”
I lay naked next to the woman I love, and I cannot turn invisible. No matter how hard I try, she can see me.
I hold my best friend’s newborn in my arms and I use mental telepathy to tell him, I feel so lucky to hold your son, my dearest friend, but I fail, and the only words I can summon are, “Wow, cool.”
My mother calls me because she, too, is alone, in an empty house, and I tell her I’m busy. After I hang up, I sit in my empty apartment.
If I had the power to control time, I would fall back through the years to the moment my sister collapsed on her bathroom floor, alone, and call an ambulance. I would have saved her life. But I don’t have that power.
I am powerless.
Superheroes are loved from a distance. They crouch on rooftops or float in clouds. And that’s how I want to be loved: waving to those down below as I fly off into the sun.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of John DeVore's work on Medium.