When people used to ask me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I would tell them I wanted to have red hair.
I wasn’t thinking of becoming an astronaut or a professional ballerina like most of my classmates. I wanted to be like Anne Shirley from the children’s series “Anne of Green Gables.”
She’s stubborn, clever and imaginative – and anyone who’s called “Carrots” but can hand it right back to her tormentors gets a gold star in my book.
I grew up identifying with and idolizing my favorite literary characters – from Jo March in “Little Women,” to the girls in the “Harry Potter” series and even Viola in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”
They helped shape who I became, how I acted and what I believed – their actions impacted me, and I learned from them as I would an older sibling.
Fast forward a decade or so: I’ve grown accustomed to juggling a full class schedule, more than one job and numerous extracurriculars. I don’t have much time to read for fun or discover new favorite characters anymore.
I fell even deeper into that rut over the summer. I was working a full-time job as a reporter for my hometown newspaper; I’d work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., spend weekends in the newsroom and be exhausted by the time I got home.
It wasn’t until break was almost over that I had a “come-to-Jesus” moment about my favorite childhood characters and their stories.
I realized I wasn’t letting myself be me – and in turn, I wasn’t letting myself remember those characters that had shaped me so much. What would my 9-year-old self have said about that? Would she be disappointed?
Anne Shirley never forgot how ardently she wanted to become a writer while she was in school, and Hermione Granger never once neglected her friends, studies or hunt for Voldemort (although, how could she?). They stayed true to who they were – and I realized I still wanted to be that way, too.
When I think back to being a kid with all the free time in the world, I think of sunny summer days, reading books in the grass and having my hair done up in braids like Anne Shirley. Until recently, when I’d think of school, I saw sidewalks creating fault lines in the quad, getting highlighter on my fingers and dreading the sound of my alarm every morning.
Everybody wants to feel like a kid again – to live in a world without student loans and all-nighter exam prep. But I like to think I’ve returned to the headspace where I can balance growing up while also remembering the kid I used to be – and the literary characters I’ve grown up with.
I never grew red hair – and I don’t plan on dyeing my brown hair anytime soon. But sometimes in the right light, I can imagine Bradley Hall to be Hogwarts, the leaves turning autumn red make me feel like I’m on Prince Edward Island and I feel a little bit closer to those characters that made me who I am.
