A few months after I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, I was struck with a sudden thought one night as I lay in bed: there would never be a superhero like me.<\/p>\n
The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced of it. Superheroes and I have exactly nothing in common. Superheroes live normal lives on top of their super ones, and I can barely handle a full load of classes. Superheroes are strong, resilient to pain, active; they are more<\/em> than the average human whereas I thought, at the time, that my fibromyalgia and the limits it put on my life made me less<\/em>.<\/p>\n How could there possibly be a superhero like me? How could there be a superhero who sleeps twelve hours a day, who can sometimes barely move because of pain, who can barely handle climbing one set of stairs let alone leaping tall buildings in a single bound?<\/p>\n I realized that this didn\u2019t constrict itself to the superhero genre. I didn\u2019t fit into any genre besides realistic contemporary fiction, because in any other genre, I thought, there was no way for me to live up to the expectations of a protagonist. I wouldn\u2019t survive in a zombie-ridden apocalypse, and if I were in a historical fiction I\u2019d at best be the sickly, bedridden sibling character. I especially couldn\u2019t imagine fitting into any fantasy or science fiction story.<\/p>\n It took me a long time to realize that I was trapped in a web of internalized ableism based on what our culture tells us a hero is. A hero is strong. A hero is energetic. A hero is able-bodied and always busy and never, ever lazy.<\/p>\n There are very few chronically ill fantasy and science fiction heroes because it seems impossible for \u201cchronically ill\u201d and \u201chero\u201d to describe the same person. There are, obviously, other reasons too, such as the misconception that chronic illnesses and disabilities will all be \u201ccured\u201d in a fantasy or science fiction environment (here\u2019s looking at you, J.K. Rowling<\/a>), but these all lead back to the fact that we can\u2019t imagine our heroes being chronically ill. The closest one I can think of is the antihero Deadpool, but that\u2019s one example in a large sea of science fiction and fantasy stories.<\/p>\n