This is Not Who I Am

Why we need people to remind us of who we are

My first role models were the orphan Anne Shirley, and the second-borns Laura Ingalls and Jo March and Elizabeth Bennet. I felt destined to a lonely life caught between being both number two and the heroine of her own story. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy in some ways; most of the things we tell ourselves as children do.

Decades later (as I have l…