My Origin

I wanted to be an artist.

My childhood dream was to draw the world, to paint and sketch things nobody had ever seen before. There was only one problem: I had no talent. In fact, if I tried to trace my hand, it came out more like a circle.

My other childhood dream was to wait until the day when fate would, via a near-death experience, leave me with incredible superpowers.

Then one day I was sitting in the second grade. My teacher would put things up on the board such as "My best friend is..." or "On weekends I like to..." And we had to fill up a page of this wide-lined pulpy paper based on the prompt. No problem. Kids love to talk about themselves.

But that day was different. That day changed everything. That day...my teacher wrote "Once upon a time..."

I wrote carefully. "Once upon a time, there was a famine in the land of Camebung." I filled front and back of that page instead of just the one side that was assigned. And by the time I finished, I knew. In fact, it was so obvious that I had to smack myself for not seeing it sooner. Of course! Superman wasn't an artist; he was a writer!

And from that day on, so was I.