UNLIKELY SUPERPOWERS

I’m back.

Maybe.

Let’s say I’m easing my way in, like someone returning to the gym after six months and pretending they never left.

The truth is: the longer I waited to write the next post, the more pressure I felt to make it great, especially after the last one about spending a week with Steve McCurry, which set the bar inconveniently high (and no, not necessarily because the post was a masterpiece, but because the experience itself was… well, objectively pretty awesome, for me :)).

And of course, life did what life does: it expanded to fill every available minute.

Between preparing the IV edition of The Raw Society Magazine (it’s going to be another great one, and it’s already available for pre-order!), hosting workshops, and planning an entire photo festival (start marking your calendars people!), the weeks just… disappeared. I kept thinking, I’ll write something tomorrow. Then suddenly it was November.

But here we are.

And for today’s topic, I have settled on Super Powers.

Is it a great topic? Not sure. But it’s certainly one that lives rent-free in my brain and gets more attention from me than I’d care to admit.

I happen to love almost all things Marvel (not sold on the whole Dr. Strange character), surprising, I know, for someone as sophisticated as myself, but it’s the truth.

There’s something childish and fun about the world of super powers, and if you can get a couple of other people on board to choose a power and explain how they’d use it, it can lead to countless hours of discussion and/or heated argument. I say this from experience, and no, these discussions don’t happen in the basement of my parents’ house as you are probably imagining. They happen while traveling, during our photography workshops, with very respectable and highly intelligent people.

Anyway, if I could choose any superpower, I’d want the ability to speak every language in the world.

A religious man once told me that making an effort to communicate with others was one of the highest ways of serving God. I’m not religious. I’m just incredibly curious. Painfully curious. The kind of curious that borders on nosy. Though not in a malicious way. It’s more like I have a PhD in Listening to Conversations at Nearby Tables. I can’t help it. I’m genuinely fascinated by what people talk about in different places, in different cultures, in different moments of their day. If anything, it’s a form of field research. Anthropological eavesdropping.

Imagine being able to understand all of it: no misunderstandings, no awkward pantomiming in foreign grocery stores, no relying on Google Translate to butcher my intentions. I’d be unstoppable.

But the universe, with its peculiar sense of humour, has given me a very different set of “super powers”. Ones that are arguably far less impressive and definitely less marketable.

For example:

I possess the supernatural ability to fall asleep anywhere.

Planes, floors, moving vehicles, uncomfortable chairs, emotional crises, you name it.

My husband learned this very early in our relationship, on our first trip together: a five-hour jeep ride crossing the Himalayas, ten people squeezed into a six-person jeep. While everyone else concentrated on the rough terrain trying to anticipate and absorb every bump, I, of course, was sleeping after minute 10.

My head started bobbing violently, up, down, side to side, forward, backward, not unlike those bobble heads they stick on the car dashboards, until eventually it swung so far forward that I hit the metal bar of the seat in front of me and split my lip.

It comes in handy though. It comes in handy though. Turns out I never needed the military sleep method. I arrived on this planet with the deluxe, pre-installed version.

I also have elite-level packing skills.

I hate checking in suitcases with a level of passion usually reserved for politics or sports rivalries, so I do everything possible to avoid it…while still trying to look at least semi-stylish. This means I’m often the person confidently wheeling a carry-on that contains exactly two pairs of shoes carefully chosen to match different outfits, because apparently my vanity also travels with me.

Give me a suitcase that’s already full and a pile of belongings that physically should not fit, and somehow I will make it work. I don’t question it. I don’t fight it. I just start doing my strange hybrid of rolling and folding like a woman possessed.

Against all known laws of physics, and zipper integrity, it always fits.

Getting Ready in 15 Minutes

Another one of my magic powers is getting ready in 15 minutes. Fully ready. Dressed, hair washed and dried, makeup on, hand-bag in arm, coherent enough to pass as a functioning adult. I realise this may sound contradictory coming right after the admission of my semi-stylish packing vanity, but somehow both can coexist.

Honestly, I don’t know where this ability came from. My working theory is that in a past life I was constantly being chased, by enemies, creditors, ex-lovers, medieval villagers with torches, who knows, and I simply had to learn to get out the door fast. So now, whether it’s a dinner, a flight, or the sudden realization that I’m already thirty minutes late, I switch into survival mode and transform at remarkable speed. Meanwhile everyone else is still debating which shirt makes them “feel more like themselves.”

Is it glamorous? No.

Is it useful? More than you might imagine.

The Most Chaotic Power: Being Helpful When No One Asked

If there’s one superpower I’ve mastered that’s less impressive but definitely more interesting, it’s the uncanny ability to be extremely helpful exactly when no one needs or wants help. It’s like my brain hears someone say, “I’m fine,” and immediately decides they actually need a full life intervention, right now.

One of my “helpful” moments happened in Marrakech. I was wandering around photographing when I stopped at a large roundabout. A taxi driver pulled up beside me and lowered his window. Naturally, I went full-on superhero mode and stuck my head inside the window to see how I could help.

The driver looked at me like I’d just invented a new form of madness, then motioned behind me to a whole lineup of taxis drivers ready to probably help my taxi-driver friend with directions.

Jorge, who’d been watching from across the street, burst out laughing and asked how I even planned to help a local taxi driver.

I didn’t have an answer. But honestly? I probably would have figured it out. Somehow.

Sometimes this can be annoying, I know, but it genuinely comes from the best of places.

A New Superpower in the Making?

Lately, I think I might be developing a new power. One that’s less flashy but potentially even more fascinating. I’m talking about the ability to communicate with animals.

Not quite speaking every human language in the world, but maybe something better. There have been moments. Looks exchanged, subtle signals, a vibe that can’t be ignored. A donkey stared into my soul with suspicious depth. A cat that blinked at me like it was silently approving my life choices. And just last week a monkey climbed up my leg, sat on my shoulder and caressed my cheek as if to say “everything is going to be fine” before catapulting off.

I’m not saying I can actually talk to animals…yet. But I’m not not saying it either.

Maybe I’m on the cusp of interspecies diplomacy. Or maybe I just have a really vivid imagination. Time will tell

Photo courtesy of Jim Hazelwood

Photo courtesy of Roman Fox

Phew, that was long and now it’s your turn. What’s your hidden superpower, the one you didn’t choose but somehow ended up with? Or the one you’ve always wished you had?

Let’s start a conversation (or an argument, I won’t judge). It’ll be fun, I promise!