Heroine or Ordinary Girl?

Growing up I read a lot. I was never one to easily slip into "the classics" although I always wanted to be. Rather, I read Nancy Drew and The Baby Sitters Club. I still read. Thanks to my book club and other external sources I am occasionally pushed to read something I wouldn't normally pick up.

Left to my own devices I tend to gravitate to the type of book you would read by the pool in the summer if you were a woman. I recently finished Whatever Makes You Happy by Lisa Grunwald. It was a fun book about a woman who is a wife, mother and author. She is trying to write a book about the history of happiness, while she finds herself caught in a quest for her own definition and to find happiness in her own life. Plus there are fun quotations from philosophers, scientists and other people who have pondered happiness in the past.

All of this is beside the point I am trying to get at. Other than to say that I think reading has a great deal to do with my thought processes; with particular regard to how I view my own life. As long as I can remember developing a rich inner life as an only child I have always thought of myself as a character in a novel. Sometimes this is comforting. For instance, when "bad" things happen I think to myself, "as a heroine in a novel this only makes my story more compelling." However, it is disconcerting when reality collides with my ideals and I realize that I am in fact, not a character in a book, but just an ordinary girl.