
I am princess, just like many of you (or a prince, if you’re male; princes can be just as lovely and noble, contrary to storybooks where they do nothing but miraculously save the day).
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I was not born in a palace. I did not grow up in marble hallways paved with porphyry, wearing silken finery, with pearls in my hair and a pond of precious fish inside my bedroom. I did not, and still do not, live in a world, where suffering does not touch me. I do not go to balls, or have servants waiting on me hand and foot. I am not beloved, in the way beautiful, wealthy and important people are. There are no handsome suitors, waiting in a line for my hand.
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But I know I am a princess, nonetheless. Even if all my hair and teeth were to fall out, and my skin to become wrinkled, if I stumbled through the streets in nothing but rags, if all the world burned and raged, and I lay amongst the ashes, nursing my wounds, I would know, with roaring ferocity, that I am, and always will be, a princess.
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Because this is what it means, to be a prince, or a princess.
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It means not to be wealthy, but to give your wealth to the needy.
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It means not to be outwardly beautiful, but to be kind, a kind of unseen beauty.
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It means not to live in a home that is like a wonderland, but to have a wonderland living inside your mind.
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If you are able to dance to beautiful music in the dark, to stand on a balcony and throw your arms out and smile; if you are able to stroke an animal, and love it; if you can look at an orphanage, on the news, online, and feel nothing but a desire to help the children; if you are the man or woman who sits by themselves near the window and curls up with a good book to float away into the clouds; if Disney movies and childhood films take your breath away; if you are the kind of person to risk your own life to go back into the danger zone to save someone else; if you are an artist, who creates dreams using paintbrushes and pencils, if you believe in magic, and see it everywhere you go—
—then you, my friend, are royalty. You are blessed. You are a prince, a princess. You are beautiful. You shine like flowers in the sunlight. God looks upon you, and he cries tears of joy at your existence, at your exquisite, beautiful heart.
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And it’s a funny thing. People who are truly princes and princesses, for most of their lives, never realise they are; usually, not until they get a bit braver, and stronger, more self-aware, and reach out to God in their adulthood, do they realise the beauty that shines from them.
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Princes and princesses are not perfect. Like everyone, we commit sin, by which I mean, any act which makes us, after its completion, feel disgraced, or ashamed, or afraid. Our hands are not spotless. Our mouths have not always spoken kind words, nor our minds. But no matter how dark, how dismal, how deeply we fell into hatred or jealousy, our hearts remained pure and lustrous as pearls.
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The reason we take so long to realise our birthright is because, from the moment we were born, full of daydreams, sensitivity and hope, our light is attacked by the darkness of others. There is a lot of poison in the world, and all of it comes from the hate, pride, greed and insecurity within the hearts of other people. There is nothing an unkind person hates more than seeing someone else showing kindness; nothing a conventional person hates more than unconventionality; nothing a cowardly person hates more than seeing another being brave; nothing an unimaginative person hates than seeing another bleed creativity from their veins; nothing an unhappy and miserable person hates than someone who seems to have nothing, yet is able to smile at the sight of flowers on the grass; nothing a person who gave up on their dreams and decided to follow society’s norms more than someone who lives boldly and bravely, pursuing their dreams to the ends of the earth, even if they die in the process; nothing someone who sees no magic in the world hates more than someone who seems to find it in everything and everywhere—
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You are a creature of light. I say this in the hopes that you will not become egotistical, or self-righteous about it; you are a creature of light, in the way birds fly, and the sky is blue. You did not earn it. That is important. You were blessed with kindness, with the ability to be happy, to see beauty, to daydream, to love and to care for other people and animals. And for the longest time, you will feel completely insignificant and out of place, more bitterly lonely than some people can possibly imagine. A lot of the world is not bright. A lot of the people in this world, while they are beautiful, somewhere on the inside, have lost their light, and have been instead been consumed by darkness.
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All those years you were trampled upon, bullied, neglected, abused, treated as stupid, silly, all those years of feeling “different”, left out—all of that, was because you shone too brightly for some people, reminding them of the light they had lost; all of the social persecution, hatred, jealousy directed at you today, is because there is nothing darkness hates more than light. You irritate those people more than anything else in the world, just by doing nothing except being yourself, by daydreaming, by expressing the gifts God has decided to give you, by feeling the happiness that you naturally let burst up from your heart. When people who have lost their light see that, they are so full of rage, and hatred, at themselves, that they seek to destroy you, believing that if they can just annihilate the light before their eyes, they will feel better about their own dark lives. What they don’t know is that darkness, if it destroys light, only becomes darker.
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You are a prince. You are a princess. People may—and they will—tear the clothes from your back, whip you until you bleed, throw you into the pigs’ pen, leave you behind while they go to the ball and enjoy themselves, cast you into the wasteland of loneliness until you are in too much pain to even scream, until you lie, broken and gasping, naked and pitiful. Do not give in. The light inside of you will never abandon you. Don’t let people who seem to hate you, and put you down, for no reason, for being happy, for being creative, for being sensitive and kind, for daydreaming, for dancing to music or singing on your way to work, for following your dreams, for knowing you have, on some level, been blessed, gifted —don’t let a single one of them stop you from shining.
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Royalty is not something you own, but something you already have, deep inside not a treasure chest, but a heart. You have been crowned, though nothing ugly and golden sits on your head, by the light and goodness that exists in the world; and no matter how much people who live in darkness loathe seeing a carefree, yet ordinary person walking around in a state of shining light, kindness, and a mysterious kind of happiness, a faraway look in their eyes, know that you are blessed, and that there is a kingdom where you belong, amongst angels and stardust.
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Do not hate those who hate your light; that is a grave mistake that I make, and still do, because it is so easy to go on the defensive when others hurt you, and often quite badly, without knowing how delicate and sensitive you are; but do not hate them, in your hearts, because they are the ones who live in a dark world of pain that you have no knowledge of, that would make the wasteland they throw you into seem like a lush garden. Instead, let them hurt you, and walk on, stumbling a little, but stumbling towards the light, which is all that matters.