Why the Little Mermaid Must Die
As we struggle with the end of the economic fairy tale we've been living and look at having to take a more grown up approach, I notice that the concept of storytelling seems to be coming up again and again. Perhaps after an age of facade and subterfuge, we are looking for authentic stories (like those of Brene Brown), or perhaps we have time again to read, to tell tales, to recall morals and values from earlier times. Whatever the case, everywhere I turn, people are talking about the value of sharing stories.
My work at Bright Sky revolves around stories--finding them, helping authors to express them, communicating their messages concisely to the world--but storytelling has much deeper resonance than the obvious job skill applications.
Years ago, I took a teaching workshop for a curriculum called Godly Play. It's a system based on the belief that the Bible is a collection of family stories. I had always intuitively believed that stories were powerful and that greater truths could be found in fiction than in fact, but this workshop made it very clear why. It explained that children who are denied stories when they are young have a much higher suicide rate than others, and talked about the intense power to heal that storytelling has. We are a storytelling people: we are hardwired to spin yarns. It's how we pass our values down to our children, it's how we define who deserves to win the prince's hand, and it's why the little mermaid must die.
When I was little, I had a beautiful edition of Hans Christian Andersen stories. It had a luminous color plate for each story, with a thin vellum insert between the illustration and the story. My favorite tale was The Little Mermaid. It might have been a fashion thing--she and her sisters wore gorgeous wreaths, each made of a different material like starfish, sea anemones, or coral--but more probably It was just a magical, compelling story. I read it again and again.
Every time I got halfway through the story and the little mermaid started making the same mistakes again, I realized with fresh despair that she was doomed. It was seafoam time again. As an adult, I understand that the fact that the little mermaid was united in eternity with the heavenly hostesses was supposed to be a happy ending, but back then it wasn't doing it for me. It was just a downer.
But, from that deep sad place I learned not to make deals with Sea Witches. Not to give away my best gifts to try to become someone else. Not to trust men who are enchanted with witchy women. It was a rough lesson, but a good one. All stories don't, can't and shouldn't have happy endings. Because life doesn't. If we want to build resilience in our children, but we won't even let them feel the imagined pain of a story, how will they ever have the resources to deal with real pain? If our stories don't introduce the full range of human emotions, we rob our children.
So it was with horror that I read an article recently that announced that scientists have discovered a drug that will erase bad memories. Wow. That is way beyond any revisionist fairy tale telling that Uncle Walt ever did.
There is a wonderful dystopian novel for children called The Giver. It is one of those short books that you could read again and again and come away from with new meat every time, like an enchanted lambchop bone. In The Giver's society, the leaders have determined that memories are too painful and too messy for the people to handle Every child is given a role at age twelve. Some will breed, some will work, it's all very brave new world-y. Getting your job at the Ceremony of the Twelves is the most important point in your life. Once a generation, one child is designated as the Receiver of Memory. And it is the hardest job imaginable, to bear all the memories--all the stories--of an entire people.
If you haven't yet read The Giver, I am certainly not going to spoil the suspense by telling you what the Receiver in the current generation does. Suffice it to say, Lois Lowry does a bang up job of convincing me that memories are worth keeping, stories are worth telling, and, as painful as it might be, we can trust that we are strong enough to bear our own stories.
This fall, we are publishing a book called Journaling Through: Unleashing the Power of Your Authentic Self by Angela Caughlin, a counselor and a life coach with expertise in guiding people through change--grief, loss, instability--towards transformation. This book takes everything she has learned about using guided journaling as a powerful healing modality in her work and combines it with the latest brain science to help us access the stories that are locked within us. Once we dive deep and find the important stories, we can use them first to formulate questions about our own lives ,and then as keys to answer those questions.
Diving deep for stories we may find gifts that we once offered up to the Sea Witch for some coveted prize, goal or person. And when we recover our gifts, they are like sunken treasure, more valuable than ever. We are a storytelling people. Our stories have great value. We can't just erase the parts we don't like. In our fiction or in our memories.
Even if the little mermaid goes all seafoam sometimes.
“Every day in a life fills the whole life with expectations and memory.”
~C.S. Lewis
~C.S. Lewis
