Omnia mutantur Nihil interit

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.