In each and every one of us their lies a Sleeping Beauty, (female AND male J )waiting to be awakened through love. Because she has slumbered for so very long, she must be awakened very gently. However, instead of waiting for a Prince Charming to storm the palace gates, you must summon the magic powers of your true self to break any cruel enchantment that has left you unaware of your own glory.
Once, when I was very young, I knew a very pretty young girl. During a very prolonged garbage strike in the city, where garbage began to pile very high, a photographer from one of the newspapers there saw her sitting in front of her Uncle’s apartment complex. He was there to photograph children near the garbage pile to emphasize how much of it had actually accumulated and to show the risk to the health of the children. The little girl shyly ran behind her uncle as the man approached and selected her as one of his subjects for the photographs. The next thing she knew she had been popped up on a pile of garbage and that photograph appeared in the Sunday paper… front page.
The next school day, several of the children began to taunt her by calling her “just a pile of garbage”. The various name calling followed her for years. In order to handle this public humiliation, she became numb to her own beauty and precociousness. You see, to her, sitting on that pile of garbage was the same as pricking her finger on a spindle and falling into a deep sleep.
The writer Merle Shain reminds us: “It’s hard to tell our bad luck from our good luck sometimes; hard to tell sometimes for many many years to come. And most of us have wept copious tears over someone or something when, if we’d understood the situation better, we might have celebrated our good fortune, or theirs, instead.”
It that young girl had not “pricked her finger” (been photographed on that garbage), would she have retreated to her room every day and sought comfort in the world of books? When she became older would she have studied the world of make believe and poetry so intensely? Would she have traveled to Paris, London, or Germany to study the poets and writers of the Victorian era? I doubt it, and I should know.
So tell me, dear reader, what was YOUR spindle? Was there that one moment when you pricked yourself and fell into a deep slumber? Or did you, like so many others, just slowly shut down? Perhaps the cruel enchantment was caused by overly critical parents, a devastating breakup, a death of a loved one, the pain of children who push you away, or the numbing reliance on drugs or alcohol.
Well, not matter what the reason, it is time to awaken. Your creativity, imagination, sense of style are FAR superior to any “sorcerer’s spell”; no matter how strong. Once can never change the past, only the hold is has on you; and while nothing in your life is reversible, you can reverse it nevertheless. For you see, WE ARE THE HEROES OF OUR OWN STORIES
