I’m going to pick a fight with Wonder Woman. Like her name suggests, she’s wonderful, I know, and most of the time, she is above reproach. But she said something that really stung me. She had just saved a bunch of school kids from being slaughtered, and she did it in the most heroic fashion, so maybe she was distracted. I’ll cut her some slack for that. But I think, after she reads this, she’ll agree that an apology is in order.
Her offending remark happened in a bank that was under siege. Terrorists were threatening to blow up the bank and everyone in it, including a bunch of grade school kids. Wonder Woman did her job and disposed of the bad guys and saved all the good guys. Just when the echo of gunfire had died down, one child admiringly said, “Can I be like you someday?” Here is Wonder Woman’s reply: “You can be anything you want to be.”
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Here was Wonder Woman’s chance to take this child by the hand and introduce her to some real critical analysis.
“Well, let’s see . . . were you fashioned from clay and zapped to life by Zeus?” The child would have rightly responded, “Who?” Next questions: “How much combat training have you received? Because I started at age 3. Do you have any Amazonian gal pals? Is there any chance you’re going to be 6 feet tall when you grow up?”
Do you see how misleading the trope You can be anything you want to be is? Adults should know that the correct answer to that question is always, “Sure, you can be like me someday, if you do exactly what I did to get to be me.”
So, why did Wonder Woman’s answer prick me to the core? You guessed it, I never became what I always wanted to be, which was an off-duty doctor. I wanted the title, and the prestige, and the money, but I never wanted to go to medical school or actually practice medicine. Gross. But the appeal of being an off-duty doctor . . . I still can’t shake it, which makes me living proof that you can’t be anything you want to be.
I have to confess; I’ve never been asked that highly flattering question, Hey, can I be like you someday? That is the ultimate seal-of-approval. Get asked that question, and you know you’ve arrived. If that day ever comes for me, and I hope it does, I’m going to need a good hour to flesh out my response. I’ll start by rephrasing the question, you know, to help the child see all the angles. “If I’m hearing you correctly, what you are really asking is, can you be you and still be like me. Do I have that right?” Then I’d explain how tricky that is, because the way I got to be me was by devoting all of my time to being me. So we dive, dive, dive into my background: here’s what I studied, here’s what I was good at, here’s the emotional trauma, here’s a lucky break . . . Along the way, I would tell the child to stop me when it gets boring. (In my fantasy, that never happens.) Now the child’s eyes are wide open, and they come to the same conclusion as the rest of us. Marry Wonder Woman or a doctor and be done with it.
Into the Comfort Zone 