After the Happy Ending
This entry contains spoilers for Disney's Tangled.
So what happens to Rapunzel after she gets her happy ending? She's out of the tower where she's spent her whole life. Mother Gothel is long-overdue dead and dusted. She finally gets to meet people. She gets to have her birth family. She finds out she's royalty. The guy she loves just proved how much he loved her. What could be better? Roll credits.... right?
But things aren't so rosy for the princess, are they? She's a sheltered child who's just been thrust into the monarchy. Her entire life, she's had parenting based around guilt and fear from a foster mother nearly as isolated as she was. Oh, sure, she's charismatic enough to talk an inn full of rogues into not killing her escort, but is she going to survive being the "lost princess" that everyone longed for? She's lost her specialness; the hair that heals people has been cut. Sure, her boyfriend cut it off to keep Mother Gothel from taking her away and, presumably, keeping her captive for the rest of her life; it's not like she was going to be able to heal anyone with it to begin with. But she still has to live with the fact that she's no longer a special, magical creature; she can't solve the pain of the world by wrapping it with her hair and singing a song. For Rapunzel, the world suddenly got a lot more complicated--and all the skills she learned to deal with her captivity are suddenly useless.
What now?
I couldn't help thinking about how very much this story is like my own, and like that of many people who have survived trying times. I survived an abusive childhood, a stint in a cult, two hospitalizations; I've been expelled from school, fired from my job, and been without a home to call my own. I too had a childhood built around guilt and fear, and I too have lost my specialness, which for me came from being a precocious, gifted child, now that I'm a thirty-one-year-old still trying to get a college degree. And even though I'm free now, with a new haircut, all the skills I learned growing up were skills that help a person survive captivity.
I took it for granted that I wouldn't be allowed to make my own decisions. Now that I'm free, I don't know how. I thought of "fun" only as something you snuck when your keepers weren't looking; now that I'm free, I can't enjoy myself without guilt. What I ate, when I slept, when I did chores, were all prescribed for me; now that I'm free, it's a full-time job just to remember to do all of those things. I learned how to pretend I wasn't disabled; now I don't know how to use the help I'm finally getting. I escaped bitterness as I learned how to care about others, but I never learned how to care about myself. I survived captivity, but can I survive freedom?
This happens to a lot of people--people who come out of institutions, out of prison, out of cults; people who get out of poverty or grow out of an abusive childhood. When you're trying to help people in captivity, it's not enough to just get them out of their respective jails. To really become free, a person has to learn how to live in freedom. It's a difficult lesson, one I haven't yet fully learned.
So what happens to Rapunzel after she gets her happy ending? She's out of the tower where she's spent her whole life. Mother Gothel is long-overdue dead and dusted. She finally gets to meet people. She gets to have her birth family. She finds out she's royalty. The guy she loves just proved how much he loved her. What could be better? Roll credits.... right?
But things aren't so rosy for the princess, are they? She's a sheltered child who's just been thrust into the monarchy. Her entire life, she's had parenting based around guilt and fear from a foster mother nearly as isolated as she was. Oh, sure, she's charismatic enough to talk an inn full of rogues into not killing her escort, but is she going to survive being the "lost princess" that everyone longed for? She's lost her specialness; the hair that heals people has been cut. Sure, her boyfriend cut it off to keep Mother Gothel from taking her away and, presumably, keeping her captive for the rest of her life; it's not like she was going to be able to heal anyone with it to begin with. But she still has to live with the fact that she's no longer a special, magical creature; she can't solve the pain of the world by wrapping it with her hair and singing a song. For Rapunzel, the world suddenly got a lot more complicated--and all the skills she learned to deal with her captivity are suddenly useless.
What now?
I couldn't help thinking about how very much this story is like my own, and like that of many people who have survived trying times. I survived an abusive childhood, a stint in a cult, two hospitalizations; I've been expelled from school, fired from my job, and been without a home to call my own. I too had a childhood built around guilt and fear, and I too have lost my specialness, which for me came from being a precocious, gifted child, now that I'm a thirty-one-year-old still trying to get a college degree. And even though I'm free now, with a new haircut, all the skills I learned growing up were skills that help a person survive captivity.
I took it for granted that I wouldn't be allowed to make my own decisions. Now that I'm free, I don't know how. I thought of "fun" only as something you snuck when your keepers weren't looking; now that I'm free, I can't enjoy myself without guilt. What I ate, when I slept, when I did chores, were all prescribed for me; now that I'm free, it's a full-time job just to remember to do all of those things. I learned how to pretend I wasn't disabled; now I don't know how to use the help I'm finally getting. I escaped bitterness as I learned how to care about others, but I never learned how to care about myself. I survived captivity, but can I survive freedom?
This happens to a lot of people--people who come out of institutions, out of prison, out of cults; people who get out of poverty or grow out of an abusive childhood. When you're trying to help people in captivity, it's not enough to just get them out of their respective jails. To really become free, a person has to learn how to live in freedom. It's a difficult lesson, one I haven't yet fully learned.