Fighting your dragons

My difficulty with roleplaying comes down to identity.  By my problem, I mean my problem on how I play my characters, not with the games as a whole.  I get a character and I write an amazing back story that I want to play, but when it comes down to playing it, the character becomes personal and the lines begin to blur between the paper character and and my own character that I have been building twenty-four hours a day for decades.  The character stops being that neat concept and becomes me.  It stops being heroic and becomes meek and me.  

It is not all negative.  If you want to know who I am, watch me role-play.  I am always good.  Good meaning not the thing that people mostly mean when they say good, but actually good meaning the person everyone wishes they could be in front of their mother.  The kind of person who gives to charity and jumps before a hail of bullets without looking who they are going to hit, good.  The role-playing experience means that when I do it very well with very few negative consequences.  But I also fail to be the heroic character that I wrote too.  To throw the die and to accept the fate and lead people through performing feats beyond imagining.  This I fail at, I become meek and afraid, as I would, at the option of throwing fate to the wind and leaping off the cliff to save the falling damsel and worry about saving myself after I have the damsel safer in my own hands.

To be heroic is to exceed the expectations of our mortal minds and do things extraordinary.  It is not just to be good, it is to be good and do it very well at the same time.  Mostly, roleplaying lets you you become the person that you can't be in real life.  It lets you be the astronaut  that is facing a life or death situation and find the solution at hand, to be the hero, rescue the princess, save the World.  But if you are on your way to save the world and you start being yourself, you fail; leaping off the precipice to catch the falling damsel, catapulting yourself off the parapets (with a catapult at the marauding dragon, becomes impossible.

My failing is this.