I love school spirit. I love feeling like I am part of a team and feeling united with my class, despite all our differences. Since grade school, I loved the one day where we all dressed up and it didn’t matter who was cool or who liked who, we could all agree that it was fun to come together and support our grade. The older we got, though, fewer of my classmates shared this mentality. Middle school came around and spirit days were scarce, with themes like pajama day and sports day. So when I learned that April 1st was superhero day, I instantly started dreaming of costume possibilities that would stand out and show my class exactly who I was. I began a mental inventory of the things around my house, from the clutters of old art projects to the closet full of board games with missing pieces. I found a neon blanket that my family would always take to the beach and a tie-dye shirt that my brother once made at a sleep-away summer camp and started to construct the perfect superhero. I didn’t want to be Spiderman, or Superman or Ironman, but I wanted to be something no one has seen before; I wanted to be something original. With my green homemade cape and colorful outfit, I deemed myself “Captain Positivity”, a new superhero that had the ability to bring a smile to anyone’s face. Looking back I can just see how biking up to junior high as an underclassman with my neon cape flapping in the wind and a huge smile on my face was just the pure definition of dorkiness. But at that moment, I couldn’t think of a singular bad outcome. When I took off my helmet, though, I looked around. Everyone was staring at me, not a single person in superhero attire. I checked the date to make sure that I didn’t dress up on the wrong day and I noticed: it wasn’t just April 1st, it was April Fools. I was that kid who had become the unwitting victim of a class-wide joke to see if anyone would actually dress up and humiliate themselves at school. At that moment, there were plenty of ways I could have reacted, but I decided to keep my head up high and roll with it, explaining my hero’s values and powers to my peers often receiving a weird look or a lame insult. The whole day I didn’t let any of it get to me. I stayed positive just like my hero would and kept playing into it and rolling with the punches. By the end of seventh period, I realized something important. I’d survived. The humiliation. The taunts. The snickering stares. I’d survived it all. That silly costume represented something more than a homemade superhero. It taught me I could cope with hardship and rough times. I mean, let’s be honest, this hardly qualifies as a true-life tragedy. But for a middle-schooler, just showing up when you aren’t the coolest kid in the school can be hard. I stumbled upon that neon cape and the tie-dye shirt the other day and it made me realize just how important it is to try to be “Captain Positivity”—not just on April 1st, but every day of the year.