I was nine when I stopped believing in heroes.

It was not a gradual thing. It happened in one night. I heard my parents fighting through the wall. Not the usual disagreements—something worse. Something that revealed they were not the people I thought they were. They were scared and angry and lost, just like everyone else.

The next morning, my Superman comic looked different. The colors seemed fake. The story seemed childish. Why would anyone fly around saving strangers when they couldn’t even save themselves?

That was the night Superman’s cape tore. It never mended.

We are all born with a library of stories in our heads. Good versus evil. The hero wins. The villain loses. Suffering leads to triumph. Pain has purpose. These stories feel like truth because everyone around us confirms them. Parents read us fairy tales. Teachers reward the good and punish the bad. The world seems organized around justice.

Then something happens. Different for everyone. For me it was that night. For my friend Rafiq it was when his father left without explanation. For my cousin Lina it was when her best friend betrayed her for no reason at all. The specific event doesn’t matter. What matters is the moment when the stories stop matching reality.

This is when childhood truly ends. Not at a particular age. Not at a ceremony. Childhood ends when you realize that the scripts you were given don’t describe the world you live in.

The world has no villains twirling mustaches. It has ordinary people doing harmful things for complicated reasons. The world has no heroes flying in at the last moment. It has flawed people occasionally doing brave things, often too late, sometimes making everything worse. The world has no guaranteed happy endings. It has endings—some happy, some devastating, most somewhere in between, all arbitrary.

This discovery is devastating. I remember the months after that night. I felt cheated. I had been promised a certain kind of universe and delivered another. The adults had lied. Or maybe they had believed the lies too, passing them down like inherited disease.

Fairy tales teach us that suffering is meaningful. The princess is locked in the tower so she can be rescued. The hero is tested so he can prove his worth. Pain is the price of the happy ending. But real suffering often has no meaning at all. Children die of diseases. Good people fail. Cruel people prosper. The universe does not keep accounts. There is no cosmic justice ensuring that your pain purchases something valuable.

This is perhaps the cruelest deception. Not that life is hard—we can accept hard. But that our hardship might mean nothing. That we might suffer and suffer and receive no redemption, learn no lesson, become no wiser. That pain might just be pain.

I spent years angry about this. Angry at the stories. Angry at the people who told them. Angry at a universe that refused to follow the rules I had been taught.

Then, slowly, something else emerged.

When the fairy tales die, a different kind of truth becomes possible. A harder truth, but more real.

The fairy tales told me that magic exists outside myself. That heroes would come. That destiny would unfold. That I was a protagonist in a story already written. When these beliefs collapsed, I was left with something unexpected: responsibility.

If no one is coming to save me, I must save myself. If there is no destiny, I must create my own direction. If I am not a protagonist with guaranteed plot armor, then every choice matters. Every day matters. Nothing is written.

This is terrifying. It is also, I eventually realized, freeing.

The fairy tales gave me comfort but kept me passive. I was waiting for my story to happen to me. When I stopped believing, I started writing.

The hardest part was the discovery about villains and heroes. Fairy tales keep them separate. Good people do good things. Bad people do bad things. You can identify them by their appearance, their music, their side of the conflict. But reality offers no such clarity.

I have been the villain in someone’s story. I have hurt people I loved. I have chosen selfishness when generosity was possible. I have failed people who trusted me. Not because I am evil—there is no such thing as evil, not really—but because I am human. I contain multitudes. Some of them are not pretty.

And I have also been, occasionally, a hero. Small heroisms. Showing up when it was hard. Telling truth when lies were easier. Choosing kindness when cruelty was tempting. Not because I am good—there is no such thing as purely good either—but because I chose, in that moment, to be better than my worst self.

This duality is what fairy tales never taught me. That the villain and the hero are the same person. That the battle is internal, not external. That I am not waiting to defeat some enemy out there—I am struggling, every day, with the enemy in here.

When I accepted this, something shifted. I stopped looking for people to blame. I stopped waiting for rescue. I stopped believing that my story was someone else’s responsibility.

My parents are still flawed. The world is still unjust. Suffering still often means nothing. But I am no longer a child waiting for fairy tales to come true. I am an adult writing my own story, one imperfect sentence at a time.

The story is not what I expected. It has no clear heroes or villains. It has no guaranteed ending. The plot wanders. The protagonist—me—makes terrible decisions and occasionally recovers from them. There is no destiny, only choices and consequences.

But it is mine. That is something the fairy tales never offered. Ownership.

Superman’s cape tore when I was nine. For years I mourned it. Now I understand that the tearing was necessary. The cape was never real. What is real is harder to wear but fits better.

We don’t get to fly. We don’t get to be invulnerable. We don’t get stories that resolve into justice and meaning.

But we get to choose who we become. Every day, we get to choose.

That is not the magic I was promised. But it is the only magic that exists.

And on good days, it is enough.