Green lantern oath article11/11/2023 ![]() ![]() Like Jessica, I still struggle every day… but these days, I usually win. The path looks different for everyone for me, therapy was the first step toward overcoming my fear. Any fear can be a great fear if you let it control you-but we’re all capable of overcoming them. I felt like I didn’t have ‘great’ fears, and I certainly wasn’t good at overcoming them. That’s something I strive for, too.Įarlier, I mentioned that phrase that Green Lantern rings always use for new recruits: “You have the ability to overcome great fear.” When I first started picking up the comics, that felt oddly disheartening to me. She succeeds by finding something deep inside herself and letting it out-by making something that only she could make. She doesn’t succeed by aping what we’ve seen other Lanterns do in the past. She’s afraid of applying for new jobs and meeting new people. She’s afraid of getting up in the morning and going outside. She’s not afraid of the same kinds of things Hal Jordan and John Stewart have faced down those are things I can’t relate to, and neither can Jess. Jessica Cruz reframed a lot of the Green Lantern narrative for me. It’s a situation I think a lot of people with anxiety can relate to: friends and family not understanding that just because you’ve had a few good days doesn’t mean your struggle is over. It’s a line that resonated with me when the book came out and still feels powerful to me today. It’s the biggest battle I have,” a frustrated Cruz explains. “I don’t ‘get better’ from this! I fight anxiety every day. Afterward, her partner-the Green Lantern Simon Baz-says that he thought she was “over this.” That she’d “gotten better.” In it, Jessica-who has been a Lantern for quite some time by now-has a panic attack during a superhero mission. One of my favorite Jessica-centric issues is Green Lanterns #15. Eventually, the ring is destroyed and Jessica receives an actual Green Lantern ring, becoming a member of the Green Lantern Corps. Jessica is chosen by the ring because she is afraid all the time, but over the course of Justice League, she manages to rein in her fear a bit and prevent the ring from overpowering her. Jessica is sought out by the Ring of Volthoom-a twisted version of the Green Lantern ring that uses its wielder’s fear to power itself. As of her first appearance, she hasn’t left her apartment in three years. She is a woman who, after a traumatic experience, has become an agoraphobe. Jessica Cruz was introduced in 2014 in the pages of Geoff Johns’s Justice League (though she had made a brief cameo sometime before that in Green Lantern). The answer lies in a character named Jessica Cruz. I get scared when the traffic is busier than I’d like-how could I ever see myself as a Green Lantern? These are men who have faced down situations scarier than anything I’ve ever dreamed of. The two most iconic Green Lanterns bear that out in obvious ways: Hal Jordan is a daredevil ace pilot, while John Stewart is a former Marine. That problem had been slowly getting worse over the years, and when I started seeing a therapist, it became clear that anxiety had been ruling my life in other ways, too. I’ve always had social anxiety I find it difficult to meet new people or speak in public. In 2019, I finally accepted a truth that had been staring me in the face for a long time: I needed help managing my mental health. When it comes to Green Lantern’s power, though, creativity is only half the story.įast forward a year or two from that meeting, and I had a revelation that was a bit less pleasant than the one about writing. It was what allowed me to be creative and to express myself, in the same way that Green Lantern did-and I truly believe, just as I did when I was a child watching Super Friends, that self-expression is a superpower. That was a revelation to me I’d never realized before that moment how intrinsic to my identity the act of writing felt. In my gut, though, “writer” was the only word that felt right. I edited stories and put the paper together, but I didn’t do a lot of writing. I chose to say, “I am a writer.”Īt the time, I wasn’t really writing professionally-I worked at a newspaper, yes, and I was in the editorial department, but we were a small town and this paper had long-standing freelancers who covered just about every important story that needed writing about. While I was at the meeting, one of the other speakers had everyone in attendance do an exercise where we wrote down, “I am a…” and completed the sentence with a one-word descriptor. Around 2016 or 2017, I was working as a newspaper editor and was invited to speak at the monthly meeting of a local club.
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