Dirty Kind of Make-Believe

The New Year makes me think about fairytales (…and oddly enough, I don’t think it’s just me…every time that I turned the computer on this week, I ran into another blog entry/op-ed piece about Disney Princesses…anyways…) I think that the New Year makes me think about fairytales because the New Year reminds me of what it feels like to dream; to dream like you did when you were little, when there was no understanding of limitation. I was a childhood dreamer, but I was never very interested in or entertained by fairytales. I never dressed up as Cinderella for Halloween. I never made my little brother rescue me from the top of the bookshelf. Frankly, I never really understood why I was supposed to look up to an illiterate, ditzy mermaid.

Before I start ranting and raving about Disney princesses, allow me to back up and offer some context. As a kid, I grew up in an extreme, fundamentalist Christian community in Texas; being openly cynical about fairytales wasn’t really an option for me. I was implicitly taught that the only dreams worth dreaming were the pre-approved dreams offered to me and that those dreams would be mine just as long as I colored in the lines, didn’t cause any trouble, listened in Sunday School, and didn’t question…anything. I had no interest in being a Disney Princess, but I also had no interest in being rebellious, so I played nice and made a really funny make-believe step-sister. At eighteen, I went to college to study to be a minister and I chose to go to the most (“most” might be an exaggeration, but there’s no way to tell) conservative Christian college in the country; where I was the only (this is not an exaggeration, I was the ONLY) female in the Bible department and the only female at this college for the pure reason of getting an education. {My thought process in this situation: If I was really going to make a difference in the church, I wanted to understand where the people who thought differently than I did were coming from (and what better way to understand them than to learn from them) and if I could hold my own in this school, then I could hold my own in any religious setting…suffice it to say that I didn’t hold my own, but this is all for another time} Every female friend I made at that college was unabashedly there for her “M.R.S. Degree” and in this educational environment, it was admirable if a woman’s greatest desire was to become co-dependent and the accomplishment most commended by the college was a wedding certificate. All this to say: I spent a lot of time being force-fed fairytales that I didn’t, personally, want anything to do with.

Far before I recognized that romancing women was an option for me, I had no interest in living out the stories I read when I was younger. Honestly, one of the most comforting things about coming out was the realization that there was no longer any pressure for me to find a Prince Charming. To be perfectly blunt, the Disney Princess stories make me feel dirty and not the good kind of dirty. (Not to mention unsanitary…I am so not a feet person. Do you think that Cinderella made the Prince wash his hands before he kissed her?) The bottom line is that I’m not afraid of a little loneliness and I’m definitely not going to marry Prince Charming just because someone wrote a story about him a long time ago.

So, where does this all lead me? Ironically, it leads me back to the beginning and back to dreaming. As a kid I dreamed about things like being a missionary in Africa or writing the sweetest (sweet as in kind, not cool) book ever written, and it’s about time I remembered what those dreams felt like. I had forgotten how important it was to dream and the New Year has brought about a new admiration for it and has offered me the self-assurance to scream, “I want to write my own damn fairytale!” I know what I want from life and just because it doesn’t look like the Disney princess stories, doesn’t mean it isn’t just as magical. At the end of the day, I am not looking for romantic salvation; I just want to find a girl that likes to read and who can keep up with my hyper-active persona. I am not interested in living in/ruling a kingdom; the city is good enough for me. I am not worried about spending the rest of my life doing dishes or staying home from the Ball; I like hard work and I’d rather meet a girl at the bookstore. My New Years Resolution is to do more dreaming (or self-edit my dreams less) and if all goes well they will involve the good kind of dirty.

P.S. Sara Bareilles wrote a song on this topic called "fairytale." Listen to it.

P.P.S. Anne Neczypor wrote about this topic (this week) as well. Read it.