Warning: “Heroes" spoilers – and potential appetite spoilers – follow. You’ve been warned.

Some interesting food for thought on today’s Heroes. In a tragic twist, it turns out that the reason the perversely attractive Sylar kills people and eats their brains on a daily basis is because his mother makes him TUNA SANDWICHES when he expressly said he DIDN’T WANT ONE. That bitch. Also, he, like, totally wants to just be a normal watchmaker, but she, like, totally disses his “hobby” and wants him to be an iBanker/president, so, obviously, she totally deserves to get scissors through the heart.

Although slightly exaggerated, the show hides a gooey nugget of truth inside. Like Sylar, I have also lived my life under the creepy looming shadow of impossible parental expectation. Fortunately, rather than turning to the only possible solution (eating brains), I have been trying to “get the fuck over it,” in the immortal words of Dan Savage. Trying, of course, being the operative word. Watching Sylar's experience does make me wonder if we ever grow out of it, or if I'm also doomed to a lifetime of eating brain.

My own brain, of course. Eating it with the unforgiving spoon of self-doubt. It's a metaphor.