“Dear Princess, My lady, my dear dear woman...I love you...and I want you to know, that you are never going to be rescued. The Prince is not coming.”
This is my new Mantra. This is the new ending to my bedtime story.
Why? Because, I don’t need to be saved.
I am through with waiting and wondering where he is.
"Maybe that’s him?" As I shop for groceries passing a male stranger in the aisle...or as I sit on the subway across from a handsome stranger...as I enter the party scanning the crowd for his crown... as my lover greets me...
"Ahhh... this is the one! This is the man who will take me into his arms, kiss me, throw me onto his steed, slay the dragon and take me back to his castle.
A.K.A.
This is the man who will take me into his arms, kiss me, do the dishes, talk to the mechanic for me, pick up the kid from school, help me plan the birthday party, etc..."
Ladies, I bet you, in your subconscious bits of yourselves, are waiting for him too. Even some you married women are secretly hoping for his rescue. Waiting for the man of your dreams to save you, to fix you, to make it all go away, to complete you, to make you happy... Your soul mate...
Well, I’m done waiting.
I am happy. I am complete. I am enough. I can clean the maggots out of the trash. I can buy a car. I can plan a birthday party. I am surrounded by love. So why do I look for it from HIM? Why do I search for HIM?
I have a very lucid earliest memory of when I first met this idea. I was in Kindergarten, and it was my birthday. On my special day I wore my favorite dress to school, I was given a cape and a crown and as everyone stood around I was asked to pick a boy from all of the kindergarten boys to be my prince and dance to my birthday song with me. At the time I loved an older boy named Jethro Redstone, and so I pointed to him. He was given a crown and as he walked to me to hold me in this dance, all of the images flooded through me. Our whole life together was completed like a movie in my mind. How we met in kindergarten and would go through all of the grades together, holding hands, then kissing, until we were finally married at the end of school, and of course having children of our own. And he slaying dragons all the way. Our parent’s shining faces smiling beside us…. Here was my Prince.
All of that that didn’t happen. None of it happened. He went into the first grade before me. I suppose he was my first disappointing human I had disguised as a Prince from a fairy tale that was embedded in my psyche.
I don’t want to come off like I don’t believe in love. I know couples that are happily together who met in Kindergarten. I believe in their love. I believe in LOVE. I believe that some people meet and find that they can live together and love together forever throughout all of their hardships. I'm not saying that I can't, or wont do that. Today, I may not feel like a true believer in the idea of what some people may call a "traditional relationship", but I get that it works for some people. And shit, it could possibly work for me too, but I'm not playing the waiting game of what is "meant to be" anymore. I am playing the game of what is.
I’m not a monogamist, or a polyamorist, or any of the ists…. I’m a lover, a learner, a teacher, a student, a romantic, a believer in love. Whatever that means to me or to you is a separate blog post. I am learning what I am every new day.
What I am not is a helpless princess waiting to be seen and scooped up and taken away from what is my “reality,”
I was her, just a moment ago. She lives inside me, and I can still see her. I found her the other day and I want her out. She’s been there my whole life. She is an ancestral gift, given to me by generations of my people.
But, she cannot live here anymore unless she gets with the program. The program being that we aren't wasting anymore of this life with waiting. life is hard. Life is easy. Life is beautiful. Life is complicated. Life is uncomfortable. Life is serious. Life is fun. Life is what we make it. Life is a voyage. Life is inter-dimensional. Whatever you believe, whatever I believe, it's not what matters. My “reality” which is my life is all of those things, and don't I want to wait another moment for the idea of a prince to save me from it. The important thing for me is that My life is my own. Life is not about HIM. A perfect ideal of a flawless strong handsome lad appearing to lift me out of my slumber. I am awake. My life is not that story. It is My Story.
Mt "reality" isn't your "reality." I don’t want exactly what you may want. I don’t want to live in a house next to my neighbor that looks the same with a white fence and a manicured lawn and a garden full of roses. I don’t want a Prince that I fall for just to find out someday that he’s actually human and not a fairy tale and he has flaws and then I fall out of love for him. I want adventure and lovers and waves, and tears of laughter rolling down my cheeks. I want to swim with a whale, shoot an arrow at a target while galloping on a horse’s back, climb mountain peaks, take Ayahuasca with my friends in the mountains of Peru, fly, work, dance, sing, climb, sleep, fuck, eat, cry, laugh, live, die… and whether I am in a loving relationship or not, I want to enjoy every minute of those things to the fullest without some embedded code of a story set in my blood that is not mine.
Mostly, I want to do all of that without wondering, asking, looking, or thinking of that fucking Prince anymore. I don’t want to make anymore decisions based on THAT GUY. I don’t want to meet any new handsome, wonderful man while the intention behind my intention is still that HE is my possible prince. I don’t want to walk around any street corner hoping to bump into the reins of HIS steed. I don’t want to listen to a love song on the radio until I can hear it without imagining HIM. I don’t want to make any changes to my day based on going to an event where I might meet HIM. I don't want to eat less or work out more based on whether I think HE will find me attractive enough. I don’t want to be having a conversation with my friend and be looking for HIM in the crowd at the same time. I don’t want to kiss a man that I like, or love and have my brain flood with all of his potential archetypal princiness, and flawlessness, and what the future of our castle life looks like. I just want to kiss him without the burden of the story.
That story is not my story.
If you want that story then you can have it. I’m not judging your story. I just don’t want it. I want to fall in love. I want to be in love. Whatever that means for me. I don’t want to be rescued. I love my life. It’s mine. And I will do my best at it, and make my own story that I want to live in every day with or without him.
Maybe that’s what it means to become a Queen and no longer be a Princess. Or maybe that’s just what it’s like to be me. Today.
