***
Individual Responsibility: Dr. Friskin
***
Dr. Friskin had helped a lot of people and planned to help a lot more in the course of her career. She’d dreamed of interesting cases and troubled people, fantasized about unlocking all their complexities and offering the helping hand they needed at just the right moment. She’d counseled religious leaders, a few actors, even a state senator. But somehow, no matter how much she had to counsel herself to keep her imagination contained, she’d never--never--imagined herself in this position.
Helping a superhero.
Or, as the case seemed to be, trying to help a superhero.
She’d admit it--she’d been a little intimidated. Take it slow and steady, she’d told herself while Superman had filled out the paperwork. Just focus and don’t get caught up in who he is.
Good advice, but she hadn’t quite been able to follow it.
He was just…larger than life. Powerful and polite and so troubled. So worried about being confused. Truthfully, Dr. Friskin was pretty sure she could spend the rest of her career unraveling the enigma that was Superman.
So, she would admit that she’d gotten caught up in the glamour of the occasion, the charisma of his personality. She was just starting to get a handle on it all when Lois Lane came to see her, spouting on about needing the superhero to solve her problems and why wasn’t she fixing him good as new.
There was nothing like having your own thoughts reflected back at you to see what was wrong.
Dr. Friskin felt the truth of her own revelation sink deep into her bones, shaking loose all her own thoughts on the superhero, upending all the notes she’d made in her notepad that now had to be locked in a vault just to keep it from any interested snoop or dangerous criminal.
The superhero.
That was her problem, and Lois Lane’s, maybe even Superman’s.
Because a superhero could only exist if, first, there was a hero.
“First and foremost,” Dr. Friskin said. To Lois. To herself. To the absent Superman. “He’s a person.”
***
