From the moment I
first saw Never-Ending Story until my late adolescence, I knew
that there was something special about me.
Like the
well-written heroine of any fantasy world, I was never entirely sure what was
special about me. Some days whatever it was felt like a curse more than a
blessing. I felt distinctly uneasy throughout many of my formative years. There
was something slightly off with the world I inhabited. The fact that I couldn’t
understand what it was upset me deeply.
When I was very
young, my older brother told me I was adopted (an absurdity if you’ve ever seen
me next to my mother.) It was typical older brother teasing, but I took him
seriously. In his defense, I said the same thing to my younger brother when he
was small.
Secretly, I hoped
that I was adopted. It wasn’t that I was unhappy as a child—on the contrary.
There are times when my childhood seems to picturesque that I have to wonder if
it really happened the way I remember it. By all accounts I was a joyful, if
quiet, kid with a loving and supportive family (run-of-the-mill sibling teasing
and squabbles aside.) I loved my parents, my brothers, our home, my summers on
the lake, but I still wanted to be special. I was absurdly preoccupied with
being different.
When I listen to friends now talking about how they're keeping their girls away from Disney princesses or their boys away from violent toys, I wonder if perhaps they're missing something. My childhood was full of Disney princesses and video games, and neither of which seem to have had much an impact on me. No, those things may be (and might have been) harmful, but there’s no possible way they can
equate to handing a quiet, smart, shy kid a book of fantasy. Add to the mix a
middle-child already convinced that she's magical, special, different, and you have the beginnings of a life-long obsession.
By the time I was
thirteen, I could name the Elven rings of power, explain the significance of
making the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs, and eagerly anticipated the
release of each new Harry Potter book. These were the outward manifestations of
my inner nerd, and even when I tried to clamp down on them, I couldn’t bring my
nerdy tendencies under control. It wasn’t a question of the things you would
normally think of when raising a nerdy child—I was a horrible procrastinator
when it came to school and if the homework wasn’t reading fiction or poetry I had no interest
in doing it. I didn't want to learn to build a robot or write a
computer program or draw a comic book. I had excellent friends
throughout my childhood and adolescence, went out on the weekends and socialized. I have never played World of Warcraft.
No, I didn't do any of those things, but I did read extensively, obsessively. Books and
fantasy stories were about the narrative I had already begun to construct for
myself. I had convinced myself that I was special—there was something new and
different and important about me. I was going to change the world in an
astounding, dramatic, superhero sort of a way. I was just waiting for my
mutation to manifest itself (C’mon, Jean Gray-esque powers!) or my family to reveal that we
had descended from a long line of female demon-slayers. Something had to be
different about me.
It goes without
saying that none of those things happened. I’m not a caped and masked avenger,
a protector of the weak, or a preserver of innocence. I’ve never been able to
manipulate the space-time continuum, and the closest I’ve ever gotten to
building a robot that will lead to A.I.’s eventual takeover was a (largely unsuccessful) trebuchet I
built in graduate school.
Even if I gave up
the desire to be a superhero or a wizard, I never lost the desire to stand out,
to be something apart from my peers. But the avenues for distinguishing
yourself as a responsible adult are far fewer and far less dramatic than being
a Time Lord or the Sandman. I knew for certain that I was too dreamy and too
disorganized to distinguish myself in the corporate world. I have zero artistic
talent and my basic grammar skills are appalling, so life as a painter or a writer was certainly out. In light of
these things, I decided that the best way to set myself apart would be as an
academic.
As I’ve said
before, I went into graduate school with a mixed bag of intentions. Some were
religious, others academic, and some were merely me trying to play to my
strengths. The way to become extraordinary was to work my hardest academically
and eventually come to some astoundingly original, beautiful insight that would
not only change the way I thought about God personally, but how the world
thought about God. Humble? Not in the slightest. But it was certainly a step
down from spending all of my time wishing that I could save the world.
I was not a great
graduate student. According to my grades, I was certainly bright enough. But I
was unable to really turn myself over to my work. I could never lose myself in
theology the way my peers seemed to do with such ease. Thankfully, the Ph.D.
programs to which I applied seemed able to suss that out from my applications.
I was turned down from academia with a speed that astonished and appalled me.
One of the central
part of any fantasy novel is watching the hero or heroine get beat down
relentlessly. However, you push through the obligatory narrative
kick-in-the-shins because you know that somewhere down the road there’s
redemption. The heroine will pick herself up and dust herself up and be the
stronger for what she just endured. That seemed to be where I was in my
personal fantasy narrative.
But I didn’t.
I didn’t pick
myself up and try again. I didn’t attempt to do anything of the kind. I
accepted that I was bested and moved on. I did what superheros and fantasy
heroines never do. I gave up.
One of the reasons
I took a job in a city apart from my friends and family was because I felt like
I needed to start over. I needed a new narrative for my life. At twenty-six, I
had to come to grips with a realization that most people make before the end of
their adolescence.
I am
ordinary.
As I said, it's
unlikely that I'm secretly the protagonist in an epic fight
against evil and haven't realized it yet. But more than that, I've realized
that I'm not going to be an academic, looked up to my scads of adoring students
and changing the hearts and minds of my peers. I'm unlikely to write a
best-selling novel or win a MacArthur Genius Fellowship or the Nobel Prize. It's been a sad
realization. And a difficult one.
Another of the
biggest tropes in fantasy writing is the change that a heroine goes through
during the course of her journey. She's not the same woman who began the quest.
Sometimes the change is dramatic (death, becoming an angel because the writers
for your show are idiots, waking up in a not-so-distant future with
thirty-some-odd personalities in your head) and sometimes it's just that the
heroine learned to how to live in a new world with a different sense of
rules.
I've written a lot lately about the gifts that a life of nerdiness has given me. Perhaps the greatest gift has been the knowledge that a person changes, sometimes profoundly, throughout the course of any narrative. They're different at the end of the story, but something of the person they were persists. Omnia mutantur, nihil interit. Something of the girl-who-wanted-to-be different persists in the heroine of my own YA fantasy novel, my desire to save the world has led to a commitment to girls and young women in my professional life. Something persists. I may not be a superhero, I may not even be extraordinary, but for the first time in my life, it seems as though being ordinary is finally, totally, enough.
