I have always been a fan of Rick Riordan and the Percy Jackson series,be ver since I was in middle school. The only thing that really made sense to me was the words on paper. I'm infatuated with the mythological world.
When I felt down or confused, I could pick up a book and drown myself in the story of other heroes. The difference between Percy Jackson and other "heroes" was that he didn't know what he was doing all the time. Sure, you hear of Superman, the superhero who knew who the bad guys were and who he needed to protect, and you think that a "good guy" is the one who wears white (in this case, red spandex underwear on the outside). That raises the question: What did that make a tiny, uncertain teenage girl in the whole scheme of things? Percy Jackson answered that very question with the exception of the girl part. He didn't make all the right decisions, in fact he didn't even make a lot of okay decisions. And here I was struggling to figure out my own way of surviving, making a lot of mistakes, and finding a lot of frustratingly tall walls I couldn't cross. Percy Jackson was the hero I wanted to be and thought everyone should be. He was not out of this world; he was like me. He was a teenager that was struggling to fit in and realizing sometimes the places you do fit in are not the ones you originally thought you should. Not only that, Rick Riordan created the series from bedtime stories he read to his ADHD and dyslexic son, Haley Riordan. The way Riordan was able to tie in his fantasy hero with his son only intensifies the parallels between the story and real life. There is never a defined line between the right and wrong decisions, but everybody, especially in America, is given at least a chance to make one. I found happiness and an escape from reality in the truthful, enlightening stories Riordan developed.
Rick Riordan recently came out with his latest series called the Trials of Apollo. In the first story, The Hidden Oracle, the Greek god Apollo is sent to Earth as a human being. As he traverses through Manhattan as a human, he says, "I will never understand how you mortals tolerate it. You live your entire life trapped in a sack of meat, unable to enjoy simple pleasures like changing into a hummingbird or dissolving into pure light." Later on, Apollo even speaks to the constant threat of death a human experiences. He wonders at how humans can act normal without freaking out over the shortness of their lives.
When I was in middle school, I found solace in the simple pleasure of dissolving into a story that was not my own. However, in high school, I found that not only was a story just for pleasure, rather it was also for tackling the big problems in our world with the the simple solutions we offered in our words. When I read these profound, yet plain lines that were meant as humorous remarks, I actually took them more to heart than maybe originally intended. As a human, I've never realized that every simple breath we take is a feat in and of itself. We are all alive because we want to be alive and we fight to be alive. After all of the pain and suffering that has occurred around the world this whole summer and before, I find solace in the simple recognition from a fictional character. Strange? Maybe. Unreasonable? I don't think so.
Everybody deserves a pat in the back for looking at the world and still wanting to continue to live on, whether it is to change the world or to simply live peacefully. We give credit to one another over accomplishing grand stunts, like the records made and broken at the Olympics or the creation of a completely solar-powered plane. But the best credit might be for our perservernece in hard times. I'm a small voice in a huge world, but I would like to thank Rick Riordan for creating amazing stories and everyone who still breathes and believes in a good world. Every breath shows whatever greater power someone believes in that we are not giving up no matter the odds.
