The wrong map.

Once upon a time is hard to recognize when you’re in the thick of it, living it, surrounded by it. Happily ever after is worse. Ever After is a time that never seems to arrive while you’re living it. These little clichés, these curious phrases are labels applied from a safe and comfortable distance, by people who aren’t involved in the events or the lives of those within the quotation marks. They live outside the elipses-- as observers, voyeurs.

Our own fairy tale never seems to materialize even while we pine for Once Upon a Time and Happily Ever After. We can’t see our stories evolving, can’t recognize the events which shape our little mundane lives into myth and epic. The people in our lives remain people in our eyes, never characters, villains, heroes, ogres, or fairy godmothers. Extraordinary incidents seem remarkable but largely separate from the everyday routine of our existence and we never attach undue import to them nor probe the event for symbolism or foreshadowing.

We exist. We live. We move through days without a real sense that we are protagonists or maybe antagonists in an evolving tale. Instead we sit in dark rows and watch the adventures of others flicker and fade before our eyes. Surely we are selfish or at the very least self-centered and we see through the lens of a first-person narrative. We cannot know what a third person omniscient would know and so we don’t feel special or enchanted or heroic or motivated to undertake quests or slay dragons or rescue princesses. We do what we do, hope someone takes notice, hope to make our mark on the world but never can see with enough perspective to know our own plot, our own story arc, our hero’s journey.

Maybe that’s why so many of us feel a bit at a loss and a bit lost. Why our jobs feel like dead ends and all our efforts seem small, humble and pedestrian. Why we restlessly change our majors in college, shift careers and cycle through partners and feel vague guilt over every ‘dead end’. It always feels as though there is a certain path we’re supposed to be on, a plan we should be following, a formula for that happily ever after, for that prince or princess, for that enchanted once upon a time.

But trying to make our story fit the mold of someone else’s journey will only ever lead to folly and unhappiness. We aren’t Cinderella, we aren’t Luke Skywalker, we have our own odesseys to navigate, our own wicked witches to evade and our own share of “your princess is in another castle” moments to deal with without trying to be someone else, without seeking out their adventures their problems and their victories. We may not be able to spin straw into gold or rub a lamp for a genie’s aid but we do have talents and skills and special powers perfectly equipped for our set of challenges and obstacles. If we stop trying to get to Mordor or Olympus or to grandma’s house or to that damned ball maybe we’ll finally be going in the right direction for our own goals.

We’re using the wrong map, listening to the wrong words of wisdom and looking for the wrong key to the wrong kingdom. But are we capable of taking hold of our own stories? Of wresting our lives out of the firm grasp of media saturation, popular culture constructs and the relentless tide of habit and tradition?