Penny, Super-Haole extraordinare
“Penny”, the name of my alter-ego, is really important to me.
She’s me, exactly 100% me, only without all the insecurity, the unecessary shyness, the irrational fear. She’s not afraid of spiders, and she’s not a nervous passenger in cars or airplanes. Penny doesn’t startle easily. Plus, she can fly.
How Penny got started:
My friend Easten and I were often bored waiting for summer school classes to start back in 1999. So we made up super-hero characters and imagined that the cockroaches and minah birds were really the minions of our arch rivals. Mine was Penny, who wore a tee-shirt with a pentagram (or 5-petaled flower, depending on what kind of community she was serving), and Easten’s was Andy, who wore an anarchy-sign tee shirt (which he actually owned, and wore often).
Whatever, it was fun, and it passed the time before Trig class.
Penny solidifies after a car accident:
One morning, Easten and I were almost injured (or killed!) by two cars colliding in an intersection as we crossed the street heading to campus. We dove into a ditch to avoid the flying glass (I actually kept a piece of the glass that I found on the road as a reminder), and the experience of witnessing something like that really… left a big impression. I knew we’d never forget that moment, and I never have. No one from the accident was seriously hurt that we know of, although one was a classmate of mine.
After that, our super-hero characters became more real. We made up crazy stories about how the two cars were being driven by warring super-villains, and we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because of that accident, we vowed to protect other innocents from being caught in the cross-fire of other super-villain wars. I think we made this up and spent the next few weeks laughing about it because honestly, the experience scared the shit out of us and that was how we dealt with it.
Penny grows with me:
That’s pretty much how I used my Penny identity from then on: as a way to deal with stuff that scared me or made me uncomfortable. I’d re-imagine the bad things that happened to me as if it were episodes in a super-hero cartoon or comic. Like, the time my previous stepdad didn’t take responsibility for something that was his fault and I had to go to court for it, or the time when a boyfriend broke up with me in a really insensitive and hurtful way.
In those times, Penny was a way for me to get private revenge against people–a way to vent.
I sometimes still use her like that.
But she’s not just a personification of my un-expressed anger. She’s the innovative hero in me too. It was Penny who helped a friend of mine stranded in Portland find someone to give her gas money to make it home. When people call me because they are lost in a strange city and I look up where they are on Google maps and help them get directions somewhere, they’re really calling Penny. When I fix something, or totally bad-ass an assignment or a project, that’s Penny too.
When I’m depressed, scared, or feeling particularly helpless, Penny is the voice in my head telling me to pull it together and let it go. She’s the voice that helps me think through my problems and to always seek to strengthen who I am.
Basically, Penny isn’t just an alter-ego to me. She’s a personal hero to me, and she’s who motivates me to be heroic and sincere as often as I can.