Fallen Princess, Rising Queen

The National Maritime Museum view, Greenwich, London

Once upon a time, a princess lived in a prestigious suburban neighbourhood. This was the kind of place where children went to exclusive private schools, whilst elders went jogging early in the morning mainly to socialise.

The queens were Stepford Wives who served their best china for women’s luncheons and tea parties while engaging their schedules around their children’s ballet classes, athletic events, and musical recitals on any other days.

The kings were mostly successful doctors, lawyers, engineers, and businessmen, who drove their carriages to work, alongside movie stars, politicians, and powerful oligarchs.

For the princess life was quite normal. To her, this lifestyle was the way things ought to be and all that she had ever known — membership in a country club, playing golf at 11 in the evening just for the heck of it, and being driven places anywhere one desired. On some random occasions, running into an armed security sniper hiding behind a tree, because the President of the country came by to visit, was not far from possible.

This was the princess’s cushioned little bubble and, to her, it was all too ordinary. She did not even realise how privileged her life was because everyone around her had similar standards of living.

She grew up accustomed to international friends who hailed from Western faraway kingdoms. Opening her mind to all the luxury, potential, and possibilities in this world, her assumptions of life’s opportunities seemed to be endless.

In this land, what has been considered a major crisis was when a house help went rouge — MIA and nowhere to be found.

The word dysfunctional pertained to a situation in which a castle did not have enough Christmas lights during the holiday season.

Frustration was when the gatekeeper at the guardhouse did not allow one’s guests to enter because they weren’t able to verify security. Thus, one had to go through the hassle of making a phone call.

Pain was when a neighbour chopped off one’s beautifully-grown plant, which happened to outgrow into their side of the fence.

Distress was when the princess came second place in the student honour roll in one academic quarter only by a 0.1-grade average, making her work twice as hard to ensure that she came first place by the end of the school year.

Programmed to expect a hundred percent in all aspects of her existence, she had patterned herself to high ideals. Everything ought to be perfect in her sunny little excellent world.… or so she thought.

On one seemingly ordinary day, an evil curse came to visit. Coming home from school, she immediately noticed that things stopped moving in the household. Like a major energetic pull that froze the kingdom.

The sensation was indescribable for it was definitely something that the princess could not comprehend. From then on things began to change around her. She kept hearing words she had never heard in her family’s vocabulary. Unfamiliar terms like loans, debts, for closure, and bankruptcy.

Everything went so quiet, like a deafening ring of silence that eats away hope. An eerie presence that everyone knew was there but no one seemed to want to speak of. All she knew was that her father’s trusted right-hand man had scammed and betrayed them for greed, along with the people they took in.

Albeit knowing in her heart of hearts that it was not her, nor her family’s fault, all of a sudden, it felt embarrassing to swim in the same pool she had gotten so used to. She felt ashamed wandering around her kingdom, knowing that the neighbours secretly felt sorry for them. The rich foreign friends, whose words she used to fully understand, suddenly sounded absolutely ridiculous and made no sense to her. All that gibberish about being part of an exclusive social club, whilst comparing their parents’ net worth, just felt disgusting and pretentious.

She was forced to take public transportation with strangers, for the carriages were no longer available to take her wherever she wanted. Small things that were not a big deal in the past became the most important necessities in life. She had to learn how to outgrow life’s little frills and quirks while accepting the more practical and realistic life mechanics. Hence, she grew up quicker than most girls her age.

From then on, her eyes opened to see the world outside her protective castle gates, finally realising that not everyone is the same. That there are different kinds of townspeople, who did not jog on flowery pavements and decorated lanes. Instead, they were running and trying so desperately to survive. Surely she had looked at them before, but never had she truly seen them from an equalising vantage point until she walked amongst them herself.

She met different kinds of individuals from all walks of life and even tried so desperately to act like them. It had seemed that fitting in was a primal way of survival. In the beginning, however, it was quite difficult to connect with the new people in her life because they found her ways a bit peculiar. Prude, prim and proper, the residues of her privileged upbringing surfaced from time to time. Despite this, she never dreamed to associate with her former lot because her exposure to the real world had opened her mind to the utmost absurdity of their lifestyles.

The only beauty of it all was that she finally found a reason to stop playing golf because, deep down inside, she really hated it. She loathed the idea of getting a small ball into one little hole many yards away with nothing but a stick. There was just something very limiting and restricting about that idea. That there was no other way to get from point A to B other than a linear equation. How could life, in its various twists and turns, model itself by that analogy? It had seemed that there were no deviations allowed for a hole-in-one solution to things — a disturbingly unjust concept to her on a deeper level.

For the first time, the princess felt so alone. It seemed like she had to tight-rope in between two worlds that are pulling her from different directions, and there was no longer a safety net.

All that linear assumption that there was only one solution to life — work hard, do things right, and get rewarded — went out the window. The reality proved much more complex than that. Sometimes, even if one worked hard and did everything right, situations could still go massively wrong.

This was when she realised that perhaps there were various ways of solving problems and they might not always be structural. One can go right, left, up and down, sometimes round and round in circles, thus mirroring the true nature of the human experience which is abstract in form. Nonetheless, albeit life’s raw and capricious forces, there still ought to be mindfulness of the core values of dignity and human integrity.

True enough, she understood that life isn’t a game of golf. It’s more like contact sports like basketball— rough, sweaty, and unpredictable but ultimately develops trust and human interaction. It involves finding many different passes to blocks and steals, bouncing around, and scoring with dunks, two or three-point shots at any given opportunity one gets. To play this game, there is no luxury of time to concentrate in silence. Every waking moment is of value, and one just has to muffle out the noise from the sidelines.

There were many nights when the princess missed the comfort of her previous life. She kept wondering what it would have been like if the elements of change weren’t so tough on her, but then again, at the back of her head, she knew that this juncture was the point of no return. All there was left to do was to move forward on an unknown path.

She had to wander this road with dirty hands and calloused feet, hoping for the best to survive. This time there was no Fairy Godmother that magically whisked her wand and told her that it was all just a dream. On the contrary, it was a pure hard, cold reality.

Due to all these revelations, she eventually made a life-changing decision — to get in touch with her true authentic self by defying the stereotypes that were set before her, finding her own middle ground, and re-writing the standards custom-fit to her values and goals.

Breaking the barriers of the deprived, self-limiting mindset of scarcity, and incapacity, she refused to fall into the acceptance that life happened to her. Instead, she created the life she wanted, out of scraps by transforming the words pain, crisis, dysfunctional, distress, and frustration into epiphanies such as perseverance, confidence, determination, resilience, and faith.

She worked twice as hard as she had ever known herself to do, pushed herself to the limits, and discovered parts of her she never knew existed. She fell so many times but managed to get back up on her own two feet. Saving her resources, she made use of whatever little she had by turning them into her own tools. Keeping fit, sharp, and agile, she relied on herself for security.

As time went by, the combination of her natural instinct for survival and her spiritual motivation transformed her into a new person. Her once soft and well-pampered hands were later used in saving people’s lives. She used her wits as her mighty sword in self-defence by slaying dragons. Her mental prowess enhanced her hunting skills in the professional jungle. Navigating around rocky terrains and stormy seas, she conquered unfamiliar territories and built the life she had always wanted for herself. She rode horses with feet apart and learned to face battle like a swordsman. She grew a stronger, well-built backbone and, more importantly, a character that could not be shattered.

No longer afraid, she held her head up high knowing that she would never be the same person again. Her existence in this world had proven much more meaningful. She was no longer a princess to any fantasy throne but a Rising Huntress to herself. She had come to terms with the understanding that comparing her to the other fragile and needy damsels-in-distress no longer gave her justice. For she became a different breed of woman — an independent, self-sufficient Amazon, who takes care of herself and dreams to build her own kingdom.

She had awakened from a long sleep of ignorance, learned to find her missing glass slippers, and healed herself from ingesting the poisoned apple of false expectations and social pressures. Hence, the Huntress, having let go of the past and earning a tremendous understanding of the true essence of her existence, lived happily ever after.