i think maybe the crux of my characterization for ginny is the unique and baffling frustration that comes of having survived something catastrophic when you are younger; forgetting — because your brain, even as a child, tries to protect you — how much work and grief and numbness it took to get through that first destabilizing trauma; and then experiencing another destabilizing trauma and going wait wait wait!! i should be able to get thru this!
trauma isn’t the whole of ginny. but post-war, she does have to forgive the fact that she was a whole human being who experienced tom and managed to get thru it, and now she is a whole different human being who experienced the carrows, and it will take an amount of time, work, and patience to get thru that. she is a whole human being searching for a myth of youthful resiliency, all the while stubbornly ignoring the fact that she is still young. that she’s not as old as she necessarily feels. that she has more in common with eleven-year-old ginny that maybe she cares to admit.
suddenly her touchstones are people she never expected. suddenly she is lonely surrounded by people she thinks ought to know her best. it’s a difficult situation to manage, because she’s a teenager / young adult, and she has all these romantic notions of what it will be When the War Ends, and none of those dreams come to fruition. and she wants to be the person who could have handled it. she wants to be the confident fifteen-year-old with a clear head and no scars, not the person she is.
and that is what is interesting to me! how she goes from looking back to what she thinks she used to be and looking forward to what she ought to be to existing as she is, and adjusting to different priorities, habits, and dreams. what’s interesting to me is how she rediscovers, oh! i still have that confidence. i still have that strength. they exist in an older body, but they are there. i still get to be happy. i still get to be me, free from the constraints of the expectations of what that should be like
