I Essay 1 Draft... and man does it suck

Not a Fairytale
I went to my eighth grade formal, the first formal dance that I’d ever been to, in a silver-blue dress and clear pumps, my glass slippers. My classmates all looked at me like I was insane, dressing up as a character for our first big school dance. I smiled the whole night and danced with anyone who asked. I accepted that my peers thought I was strange for my behavior because I was happy just doing whatever I felt like, and for some reason, I felt like Cinderella. I don’t know why I was so obsessed with everything that I’m not, or why I still have Cinderella dolls on shelves all around my room, but I do.

I used to be sure when I was a kid that I’d meet my own Prince Charming and that would make everything better, but that wasn’t exactly what happened. For Cinderella, she meets a man and all of her troubles are over, she just had to fit into a shoe. In real life, you go out with a guy and maybe, just maybe he’ll friend you on Facebook the next night if you ever hear from him again. The worst thing that could have happened to Cinderella’s love life was a blister on her foot, with real people, you’ve got stalkers, and crazies who threaten to kill themselves if you ever leave them. Prince Charming wouldn’t have done that.

Cinderella didn’t have to worry about if she’d fit into that pretty dress come time for the ball either. She didn’t spend weeks and months dieting in order to look like a waif, she just did.

When I was 12, I tried out for a children’s production of Rogers and Hammerstien’s Cinderella, which was a big deal for me, since I was sure that I would get the lead role. I thought I was born to play Cindrella, and that was why I felt such a connection to her. I wore out my VHS copy of the Leslie Ann Warren version of the musical trying to get ready. I was certain that I could sing “In my Own Little Corner” perfectly. I went to the audition dressed in a makeshift peasant costume and sang my song and read my lines. I was sure that I’d floored the middle-aged woman that was making the casting choices, knocked her right out of her silly tie-dyed blouse, but apparently I was dead wrong.

The next week I got a call saying that I was cast as one of the stepsisters, because I obviously didn’t have the body type to play Cinderella. I got to lament being a “solid girl” while the person they chose to play Cinderella got to wear the pretty silver dress that sparkled under the theater lighting and dance to “Ten Minutes Ago.” I got to wear a hideous frizzy red wig and complain about being fat and unloved. What did the stepsisters ever do to deserve the kinds of fates they get in those stories, anyway?

In the Brothers Grimm version of the story, the sisters mangle their feet and have their eyes pecked out by birds, all because they wanted to please their mother. In most of the other versions of the story that I’ve read, they just end up alone and unloved by the end. In “Ever After,” the fat one got a goofy sidekick for a love interest and got to have her own version of happily ever after, but that still supposes that the fat sister, who in that movie wasn’t even particularly fat, could only ever expect to be appreciated by a socially awkward, unattractive man, or that she even particularly needs a man.

I rejected most of the things I learned from Cinderella by the time I was in college. I talked a big game with most of the people I knew, swearing up and down that she was a symbol of the oppression of women, forced into domesticity and only freed by the acceptance of that role through marriage. My room was still filled with dolls, and a glass slipper ornament was on my shelf until Christmas, when it would have a place of honor on the plastic branches of our tree. I had started to realize just how little Cinderella did to help women like me, but that didn’t mean that I wasn’t still utterly obsessed.

The one thing that I had given up on was the idea that there was a magic solution to my problems. When I was a kid, I’d always pictured that one day there would be a handsome prince coming to rescue me from my own life. Every fight I had with my mother, every time the water in our house was turned off because she forgot to pay the bills, I would escape to a fantasy world where I was the waif-like beauty and there was a prince waiting for me.
The first “prince” I found wasn’t particularly charming. Billy was a quiet, awkward, big guy. At six foot five inches tall, he towered over everybody else he knew, including me. He wasn’t one to talk too much, and that suited me just fine, because I didn’t really particularly want to listen to the kinds of things that went on in his head, which mostly revolved around video games and football. I’d gone to high school with him, and he never went to college. I was nineteen when he proposed. I laughed in his face.

A year after we broke up, he followed me to a campground where I’d planned to spend a weekend with my friends. He pushed me up against a wall at a convenience store in the middle of nowhere where we’d stopped for gas. It took three of my friends to pull him off me. The rest all seemed to follow the same pattern. Obviously Prince Charming didn’t exist.

In the end, I stopped trying to find connections between myself and a silly old story. I worked hard with what I had, a brain and a loud, outspoken personality. I threw out half of my dolls, and put the rest up in storage. I think they’re still up in my aunt’s attic, collecting dust. I kept the glass slipper ornament though, sitting on my desk as a reminder of something I used to love. I’m not waiting for any prince now, and I’m certainly not attempting to be any kind of pillar of traditional femininity. I am just me, and that’s got to be enough because there are no Fairy Godmothers or Prince Charmings here.