7. Pippi Longstocking as a role model

Knowing where the role model ends and your future self begins

Hello friends,

There are a lot of people and fictional characters I’ve admired throughout my life. However, after going down the rabbit hole of a person’s work or biography, I always become aware of substantial differences between their lives and mine. I can let their examples inspire me to a point, but ultimately my body, natural inclinations, and life circumstances shape the dreams I pursue.

In first grade, my mother read the Little House on the Prairie books to me. The homesteading adventures of Laura and her sisters made me want a sister too. Realizing that one wasn’t going to appear out of thin air, (it would be 44 years before I found out that I had two of them!), I set my sights on other stories.

In second grade, I found myself in a different home and a different reality. And another role model stepped in to fit my life.

7. The Colonial Inn

I was so proud of myself for being able to read a book without many pictures that I brought Pippi Longstocking to a second-grade show-and-tell. I believed my classmates absolutely had to know about Pippi and her adventures at Villa Villekula.

There were many parallels between myself and Pippi: the family situation, the social situation, and our unusual homes. She also wore funky clothes, which I compared to my homemade clothes (my mother made the floral top delightfully mismatched with the plaid pants in the photo). The Colonial Inn was three-story historical building with rooms for rent, and Scotty was beginning the gemstone trade.

The biggest differences between me and Pippi were that she liked to break the rules and she didn’t like school. It took her all night to write an invitation to her tenth birthday party. Even at age seven, I couldn’t imagine not knowing how to read and write and do math.

Pippi gave me permission to be the odd girl that I was. But I knew that by the age of 10 I would be reading long books without pictures, doing long math problems, and going on lots of adventures to tropical climates, like her trip to the South Seas.

Who were your fictional childhood role models? How did they influence what you believed was possible for yourself?

Your future self is your best role model

In his Oscar acceptance speech, Matthew McConaughey said that his hero has always been who he will be in 10 years’ time. I can relate to this concept. Throughout my life, I’ve had the ability to tune into who I needed to be in the future, and set myself up for the experiences to make that happen, however amorphous the goal may have seemed at the time.

Characters like Pippi appear at just the right time to inspire me, and life will continue to deliver surprises that no role model could have prepared me for. Perhaps then, how I meet those goals and handle those surprises will make me a role model for someone else.

The Colonial Inn, Bath, New Hampshire, 2024. It’s been abandoned and falling apart for several decades.

When I get confused about what I need to do, I’ll sit in meditation and listen to my future self for a specific date. Recently I sat with, “What do I need to hear from who I’ll be this July?” The series of vague impressions I received were more feeling-based than directional, but afterward I found myself taking actions that surprised me. If I knew exactly what was going to happen, it would be no fun getting there.

May you tap into your future self as a role model this week, and let yourself be surprised where it leads you.

Love, Lee Ann