I don't remember how old I was when I realized I was just like everyone else, but it must have been very young. I was a bookish child, and A Little Princess was my favorite book for a long time, but really I'd read anything easier than Jane Austen (I tried, I really did) until I was probably 11. Then I discovered audiobooks and it broke the wall between my brain and harder books (...like Jane Austen).

One of the consistent tropes in children's books, classic or otherwise, is the child who is a "little different". As tropes go, it's a good one. Everybody probably feels a little different at some point in their life, and bookish kids more so than others. Authors with any sort of self-awareness have to acknoweldge that they are oddballs, and it's only natural for them to populate their books with these characters. The problem is pretty consistently how these characters are portrayed as different. Sometimes it's because they are a loner, exploring the woods and being by themselves, sometimes because they read constantly, sometimes (I'm looking at you, "wholesome" literature for girls) it's because they're completely selfless/pious/would-never-gossip/don't-care-about-boys.

For a good chunk of my childhood I lived in the knowledge that I wasn't special. I wasn't heroine material. Sure, I liked being alone in the woods, but the civilized woods obviously. The German woods, the woods behind my house in Rheinland-Pfalz. I loved books, but I'd never read any Ovid or Shakespeare. No Milton references flowed from my lips, nor did I cite Boethius in conversation as the bookish heros of novels did. And I liked boys. Some of them were cute. I figured I'd even get married one day. The list goes on, really. If something was an iconic symbol of being "a little different", I was normal. I wanted to be pretty and wear makeup and talk about boys and what so-and-so said at the party last week.

Actually, I hadn't planned to go this route when I started writing, but the answer came to me as soon as I wrote her name. "Her" being Jane Austen, of course. Because a major milestone for me came when I met Elizabeth Bennett. Lizzie Bennett is almost certainly Austen's most ordinary heroine. She doesn't have Jane's goodness, Fanny's humility, Emma's wit, Anne's tragic backstory, or even Catherine Moreland's invigorating youth. She's a little old but not very, she's pretty but not extraordinary and, critically to my developing mind, is "not a great reader and [takes] pleasure in many things." In many ways, Elizabeth Bennett was the first literary character I saw myself in as I actually am. Sara Crewe, of A Little Princess, was an aspirational heroine, but Elizabeth was me as I am, with pride and follies but a strong desire to do right. Without hoping to catch a man with £10,000 a year, I could at least be the heroine of my own little life.

Beyond that, the thing about being ordinary, while a little disappointing for a seven-year-old with illusions of grandeur, is that you can then just be yourself. I mean, I guess one could attempt to lie to oneself (I rather suspect many of us do) and pretened that, oh no, I don't like gossip or cute boys or girls, or looking pretty or whatever trait of ours we've decided is a vice. Someday I'll write about that concept of vice because it's worth noting that gossip is a vice but the desire to know things and talk about people and events is not in itself vicious. But it's easier and more liberating to say, "This is who I am and I might as well be the best Me that I can be, because I can't be anybody else."

This all makes it sound very easy, but there is grief at letting go of one's heroic ideal of self, as well as a sense of failure. This is where a Lizzie Bennett is very helpful. In letting go of an idealized self, we don't choose complacency. We don't allow our definition of "ordinary" to then define us and restrain us from ever being better. A Lizzie of one's own to demonstrate the growth and change one can achieve is incredibly encouraging. You're not giving up on being better than you currently are, you're giving up on being some other person entirely.