Eat shit. Go hero worship on reddit. You can’t trust people to be your heroes. It’s important to remember that you never truly know your heroes. Heroes are just people. People change. People are bought. People lose sight. People die. Never forget, no matter how it happened, that whenever you lose a hero, the things you believe don’t stop being true. The people you believed in weren’t the physical embodiment of whatever it was for which they had stood. If they betrayed you or turned their back on their ideals, the ideals themselves are not any less valid.

This is because it’s not the person in which you believe. They didn’t make you believe those things–you already knew those things were right. You saw a strong person working toward your ideals–or one who had a clearer, fully conceptualized idea of what they were. In that moment, you knew they could be realized, because another person–fallible, like yourself–sought to achieve them. They only thing they really made you believe in is yourself. The reality is that since you never really knew your hero, they were always just an idealized projection of you. With them gone, you can choose to let those ideals die, or you can choose to pass them on yourself. A hero is just ideals with action. Choose to be your own ideals and you choose to be your own hero. A hero is just a focal point for the self.