A thought struck me when I was reading a story called "The Deliverers of Their Country" in The Victorian Fairy Tale Book. It spun a tale of how England's mild and rainy came to be. And it involved dragons and a broken weather tap. Fairytales...I see them as they are now. They are the stories that pre-dated science and facts. They are the stories that existed to help us humans feel better and safer about the strange happenings in nature and in our lives. They still do. We just tell it differently and call it by other names.
At its heart, fairytales are origin stories. It is how things come to be...told in a much more enchanting way than talking of weather patterns and geospatial locations can.
So what of us? What are our origin stories? When I think of origin, I think of where I come from. But coming from the fairy tale angle, it is more than just our past, our name, where we were born. An origin story, I decided, is how I came to be me.
The origin story is the outline of myself. My essence, my values, my reason for being. It is the outline of books and solitude and the imagination.
Within the outline, the story of myself continues. I can shade it darker or lighter. I can make the patterns straight or squiggly or cross-hatched. Inside are the patterns of my opinions and ideas and emotions. They are a part of me but, I now realize, they are not me.
It is hard to let go of who I think I am outside of my opinions, ideas, and emotions. It's a work in progress and though painful at times, I'm having fun playing with the different patterns. I can almost taste the freedom of simply being. Not being me or another person. Simply being.
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