I am a Heroine

When I was young I wished I was a princess. I waited for the day my parents had to tell me the dreadful news that I was not actually part of their family (gasp), that, in truth, I was a princess. The story would be that they had promised to take care of me until it was time to return to my kingdom, which would be on my sixteenth birthday, naturally. That day never came. My dad also never surprised me with the secret that he was a king who nobly decided live as a commoner for a while. Worst luck for me.

I slowly grew out of my desire to be a princess and replaced it with a longing to be a heroine, like the ones I idolized in books: Anne Shirley, Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, etc. I related to these characters and their world (no royal blood, no magic) and I admired them more (they held a bit more depth than my Disney princesses did). As fate would have it, I had just as many problems being one of these heroines as I did in learning I was a princess. The sad truth was that both my parents were living, were sane, and we were not destitute. This is not a good backdrop for a heroine. I also lived in the wrong place—a suburb in America, not a quaint town in England. But the irrecoverable misfortune was that I was simply born in the wrong era. I lived in a time of cars and when women wore pants. How can I be a decent heroine if I do not travel by horse and buggy or wear petticoats?

In recent years I progressed to a new phase. In the two decades I spent as a heroine addict (ha ha) I noticed only one real difference between me and them. Putting aside the obvious fact that they are fictional, the only difference is that they had an author—a Jane Austen or L.M. Montgomery to write their story. After reaching that conclusion, I quickly came to a second one: I am a heroine, just unwritten. I lost my longing to be a heroine as I embraced the realization that I already was one, standing in the midst of my own story. I discovered the truth in the words of Sara Crewe from A Little Princess, “I am a princess. All girls are.” Or in my case, “I am a heroine.”

I am a modern-day, quirky, non-fictional heroine and am happy to be such.