“Storybook endings, fairytales coming true, deep down inside we want to believe they still do.        In our secret-est heart, it’s our favorite part of the story…start a new fashion wear your heart on your sleeve, sometimes we reach what’s realest by making believe. Unafraid, unashamed, there is joy to be claimed in this world.”– Ever Ever After, Carrie Underwood.

People say that if you see life as a fairytale you are delusional. Like in “Enchanted.” Upon meeting Giselle, almost everyone thinks she’s loopy. And she is naïve. The only drawback to her outlook is that she is easily duped. She needs to be protected.

But in a sense, Giselle is protecting everyone she meets in our modern world from giving up on their dream. She makes them happier. She saves them from complete cynicism.

The sad fact is, few of us would be so receptive in real life to someone like Giselle. The advantage these movie versions of us have, is that they realize they are having a rare adventure, and though they doubt it will end well, something in them just has to follow it to the end.

We on the other hand, seem to go through life half asleep. We don’t have a sense of adventure, and we don’t dream that the quirky people who believe in that stuff might just be in our lives to help us.

Why would we even think it? Who are we? That’s the thing isn’t it? We just do not get it. Why would we be worth noticing.

Maybe that’s why we turn to horror and thrills. At least if we can feel the fear, we can relate to something different than our everyday lives; and sadly, that is what we believe we deserve. Fear.

After all, our culture is obsessed with fear isn’t it?

The biggest mistake we have made is thinking we woke up because we decided what used to be our nightmare was the reality, and what was our happy dream, that was just in our head.

That’s why when I clash with people because of my more Giselle-ish outlook, they always have a sort of bitterness when they tell me off. You may have–almost certainly have–hear the tone yourself. You’ve probably used it. I’ve used it myself. The “I can’t expect any better than this crud,” tone.

But the fact is, we’ve missed the point of fairytales entirely.

They always have villains. The heroes rarely realize they are heroes. There are evil spells. You think fairytales are always happy? My advice is to read the Ever After High series, by Shannon Hale. Some of them don’t actually end happily, but those that do, do so only after a lot of trouble.

Disney gets criticized even for this, (they get criticized for being too dark and too light, which proves that when something is actually good, it can’t please either extreme.) But I’ve never found Disney to teach anything unrealistic as far as trouble goes. Except that fairies don’t often appear to people and offer their help, but that’s not to say others do not help us. We just don’t recognize it for what it is.

What people really hate fairytales for, nowadays, is that they have hope.

We have dug our own pit with this one, however, because it is our morbid love of the morbid that has convinced us not to have hope. That hope is for suckers and losers.

How ever do you become a winner without hope?

It doesn’t matter how bad your life has been, the choice to lose hope is always your own. What baffles me is that the people who have the easiest lives out of the world’s population, they tend to have the worst outlooks. I guess they just don’t fight for hope.

I am not inconsiderate of those who truly have had the hardest lives, worse than I can imagine, but I maintain they need hope more than anyone, because what else keeps you alive?

I believe life is a fairytale. Because I believe fairytales were meant to teach us about life.

It may seem that my Christian faith would interfere with this outlook, or perhaps that this outlook is all you could expect from a Christian, but neither is true. Few Christians I know share this outlook, and it is not at all incompatible with the faith.

God actually often uses such terms as we would attribute  to a fantasy story. He speaks in metaphors. There is a clear reason for this.

The realest things we experience are the invisible ones.

You cannot see the wind, but it can uproot a tree. You cannot see germs, but they can kill you. You cannot see the things that keep the world functioning. You cannot see ideas, but they control society.

In the same way, fairytales really tell us about what we cannot see. By using things we can. A wise child will grow up retaining what he or she learned from these stories.

No one can convince me this is not true, though I know they will try, and I deal with that almost weekly. AS always though, what you believe is up to you. I only hope I have laid out my case in a  way that makes sense.

This blog is not necessarily about changing people’s minds so much as it is about introducing them  to new possibilities. I leave the exploring up to them.–Natasha.