Batman Is a Terrible Role Model

I used to think that strength meant not expressing strong emotions and not revealing problems. I believed it admirable to aspire to be a stone-faced, un-flenching creature that would remain unmoved in the face of fear and unchanged in the midst of transformation. Batman is the perfect representation of this ideal. Living for years and years with buried emotions based on traumatic child-hood events, he doesn't have many friends and rarely appears to confide in anyone. Batman is a terrible role model.

There are many obvious reasons why one should not idolize this fictional character. I reference him in this post only to reiterate what an unhealthy world view can look like. Though I never strictly adhered (or came close) to following the lonely and unmanageable way the character was written to live out is life, I did try to bury my problems in hopes that they would just go away, whether I realized that is what I was doing or not. Instead of tackling them head on or asking real people for help, I used to just distract myself and move forward. If someone asked how I was or if anything was wrong, I always gave the answer that would not warrant any further conversation. "Good." "No, nothing is wrong." I tried to Batman my problems away.

As a child, I was raised to believe that no problem was too big for a particular religious deity to handle. If I just confessed my problems to It, I could move on with my day feeling absolved as if all my problems were just automatically handled. There are a number of reasons I feel this method of going about life is extremely unhealthy, but in this context, it reinforced that I didn't need to actually deal with anything. Someone else could do that for me, freeing me up to being this person that didn't really need to acknowledge having flaws or problems. All of this compounded over many years and exacerbated my perfectionist personality, eventually leading to an emotional breaking point.

I don't think religion alone was entirely to blame for my lack of strength to ACTUALLY deal with my own problems, but it was definitely a major contributor. These days, I've learned much healthier methods of having awareness and engaging with problems as they come. Being mindful, less judgemental, and having compassion on myself have been key to my in-progress recovery. One big aspect of this compassion is not being too hard on my past self for the way I lived, because there is absolutely nothing I can do to change it. It was the only way I knew and can only use it as a reference point to know how not to live moving forward.