Lj Idol Two: What really matters
Thank you to everyone, who commented on my last entry. I'm sorry I didn't comment back, this year has been very overwhelming with teaching, covid, demanding and crazy parents at school, and a lot of work in graduate school. But please know I appreciated everyone of your comments.
This is a dark story. I tried to list all the triggers in the cut, but in case I missed one, please know that this could be triggering. I went on a dark path with this entry because that's where the prompt brought me, but it does have a happy ending.
Once upon a time, there was a princess. For the most part, she has a good childhood. She had a lot of friends at school. They would draw pictures for the lunch ladies and do each other’s hair during recess. She also enjoyed school, even though her ADHD and dyscalculia made it hard to learn math and stay organized. She also got along with her family. She would watch her brother, the prince, play Final Fantasy and Dragon Warriors on Nintendo while she wrote long musicals on her typewriter for her My Little Pony dolls.
Every winter, the princess’ grandparents would take her to visit Florida, where their castle was located. The princess loved going to see them. Every morning, her grandfather and her would visit the swimming pool at their estate and race each other across the room. The princess always won the swim races, but she didn’t realize that he was letting her win since she was so young. During the day, they would take the princess to Disney World, and she would ride Space Mountain with her grandpa while her grandma watched. After they came home from Disney World, grandma always let her eat Neapolitan ice cream. The strawberry was her favorite.
The royal family would take a weeklong trip to their lake castle every summer. The prince and princess would go swimming in the lake and eat lots of delicious food like fudge, ice cream sundaes, pasta, and pancakes. There were two amusement parks near the castle. At night, the royal family would walk up and down the main street of the lake town and play games. The queen and the princess spend hours in arcades trying to win tickets to get even more stuffed animals for the princess’ bedroom, while the king and prince preferred playing miniature golf.
Suddenly tragedy struck the royal family. The queen was in a horrible accident. She slipped on ice in the winter, plummeted down the stairs, and injured her knees. To help the queen, a doctor prescribed her blue pills. At the same time, the king lost his kingdom. The king and queen decided to move the princess and the prince to a nearby country called Flytena, where nobody knew them. The problem with Flytena was that the citizens of it were wealthy. They wore fancy clothes, they drove expensive cars, and they looked down on people who weren’t as rich as they were.
The former king struggled to find a new job. He was over-qualified for most jobs because he was had been a king, and nobody wanted to hire a new monarch. The queen lived in a blue pill-induced haze. The former royal family had to go on food stamps, and sometimes there would be weeks when all the princess had to eat was ramen noodles.
The former queen knew that the only way to rise up to the lifestyle that she had grown accustomed to was for the princess to marry rich. So, she started attending all the public events. At one of the events, she met a lord named Michael. Lord Michael was a successful actor, and he ran a prestigious art academy within Flytena. He also had a son that was the princess’ age named Jason. The former queen started kissing up to Lord Michael. She took the little money her family had and gave it to Lord Michael to invest in his art academy. She volunteered to be on the board of admissions at the art academy, which helped the princess be accepted at the school on scholarship. The former queen ensured all of the princess’ classes were with Jason.
The princess didn’t really like the art academy. She couldn’t sing very well, nor could she dance because she was klutzy and absentminded. She wasn’t an outstanding actress either. She got parts in all the shows and musicals because of her mother, but she didn’t enjoy it. At the same time, the former queen started inviting Lord Michael and Jason over to the house. The princess did not like Jason. He would behave perfectly when other adults were watching, but his true nature came out as soon as they went away. He was sneaky, manipulative, cunning, and a liar. He knew that he had power over the princess because of his fortune, and it wasn’t a secret that the former queen wanted her to have a future with Jason, especially when she kept finding reasons to leave the two alone together. But one day, Jason crossed the line.
The former queen and Lord Michael had gone to a board meeting for the art academy. The former king drank too much mead and had fallen asleep on the floor in front of the bedroom. The prince was making the right connections at a classmate’s birthday party. It was a late night. Jason was flipping through the cable channels when he found an adult movie. The movie had a man forcing a woman to strip while touching her in private places. Jason said he wanted to act out the film with the princess. The princess tried to say no, but Jason promised her that if she didn’t do what he wanted her to do that he would ruin her future. The princess was nine years old. Jason held her around her neck tightly with his massive forearms while he ran his other hand all over her body. He promised that he would kill her if she ever said anything.
The princess was scared. When the former queen came home from her meeting, she told her mother what had happened. Her mother called her a fucking liar and said she was just trying to get attention. The princess figured that if her own mother didn’t believe what was happening to her, nobody else would. This continued until the princess was 12.
When the princess was 12, she thought she had a small group of good friends. Unfortunately, the art academy was a small school, and everybody knew everyone. Also, in Flytena, money was the actual language of communication. During an overnight retreat for a choir tour, the princess roomed with some of her friends. Her friends thought it would be fun to play “Truth or Dare.” One girl, named Allison, asked the princess, “Truth or Dare?” The princess was afraid of choosing dare because the girls, who had already chosen dare, had been forced to do crazy things like prank call strangers flash each other body parts. One girl had even been dared to climb out of the hotel window and walk on the window ledge to visit the boy’s hotel room. Jason was staying in that hotel room. So, the princess said, “Truth.” Allison asked her about the scariest experience she had ever had.
Jason kept on touching her when they were alone together. But now that she was older and her body was more developed, he was making more demands. Now he wanted her to touch him. He also tried to penetrate her in different places with his fingers. He was also much bigger than her. When he grabbed her to hold her in place, his fingers left a huge, bruised handprint on her fair skin, and he promised to do much worse if she said anything to anyone. The princess was sick of being scared and having no support. The former queen was useless because she was strung out on too many blue pills. The former king was in a deep depression and often found himself tucking in bottles of mead instead of his own children.
On the other hand, the prince was living the perfect life. He had the correct friends, was invited to the right parties, and made the proper social connections. The princess thought that maybe if she told her friends what was happening to her, they could help her, so she told them all about being molested.
Unfortunately, her plan backfired. The girls immediately confronted Jason about what he had done to the princess. Jason denied everything she said. He said she was a loser who just wanted attention and longed to be popular. He called a slut. He told everyone she let him do things to her because she was easy. He said that her family was poor, and they didn’t care what happened to the princess if it brought them a better life. The princess ran away from the room, crying. Maybe it was her fault. Her mother thought she wanted attention, and perhaps she brought this upon herself.
As the princess got older, her life didn’t get any better. Her grades were horrible in upper school because she couldn’t focus on her classes. The affluent students who attended the academy would make fun of her in every class. They called her things like a lesbian, and boys offered her money to suck their dicks. They made fun of her clothes and her strange accent from her former life as a princess. She was a social pariah. The instructors looked the other way when these incidents happened in class because her family had no money, and without money, nothing mattered.
As soon as the former princess graduated from the art academy and went to a university, bad things started happening again. The former queen was taking more and more of her blue pills and becoming violent and angry towards her daughter. She hit, punched, and threw things at her daughter because she claimed that everything was the daughter’s fault, and that’s why the reputation was as bad as it was.
The former princess struggled through university. Her grades were horrible, and she had no drive or ambition to better herself. She tried meeting friends, but since she had no positive social role models from her childhood and adolescence, she didn’t know what a good person was and gravitated towards the first group of people that accepted her. They introduced her to drugs. She really liked drugs. She loved how they turned off her brain and made her forget how awful her life was. She enjoyed the taste of mead like her father had. It was so easy for her to just drink some mead or do some drugs and forget about life whenever something went wrong.
She had too much to drink and smoked too many things one night. She woke up naked in her dorm room surrounded by empty kegs of mead and weed remnants to the sound of cops raiding her room. All of her former friends blamed her. They said she was a druggie and a slut and would wind up living on the streets and selling her body for drug money. There were so many derogatory stories about her reputation that it didn’t matter what she said to defend herself. Finally, her father and mother had to come to the university to talk to the police. After they spoke to the police, her mother beat her and further emphasized that she was a fuck up.
The rest of university was not much better. The princess met her first boyfriend, but he didn’t come from the right “type” of family. He wasn’t much better than Jason. He was neurotic and violent. He needed to know where she was twenty-four seven. If she did something that he didn’t like, he would cut himself with razor blades, force her to look at the bleeding cuts, and tell her that she made him do that. He wasn’t violent with her, but he was violent and threw dishes at her. He also wasn’t committed to her despite his neuroticism. He cheated on her four times. She wanted to break up with him. She knew he wasn’t a good person, but at the time, he was the only person that showed her any positive affection and affirmation. She was relieved when he broke up with her for the final time for a barely legal teenager, as sad she was because they had been together for a long time.
Knowing that her family was never going to support her, she got a job working at a daycare for special needs children. One day, her mother called her and started yelling at her at work. She accused her daughter of stealing her blue pills and taking them herself. She called her daughter many things, a drug addict, a disappointment, and the worst mistake of her life. She had such a bad panic and anxiety attack that the school had to call 911.
A few days later, she returned to her job. Her coworkers showed empathy and understanding instead of telling her what a horrible person she was. They told the former princess that she deserved better. They told her how the blue pills messed with her mother’s head and sense of reality. They told her that she was intelligent and creative. They told her how amazing she was when she worked with the students. They encouraged her to go back to school. She confided in them about everything she had gone through growing up, and instead of judging her, they supported her. The princess had never heard such positive things said about her, and that’s when she realized what really mattered. In her case, it was validation.
Fifteen years later, the princess was finally living the life she had always deserved. She went back to school, got a special education degree, along with several other degrees, and graduated Magna cum laude. She moved far from her family to be a special education preschool and met a lord on her own. His name was Justin. Lord Justin encouraged Princess Lyssa to be her own person. He supported her interests, like playing video games and reading books. He was willing to try new activities to make her happy, like taking road trips and visiting foreign kingdoms. He didn’t force her to do anything she didn’t want to do. If she had a bad day, he didn’t tell her it was her fault or blame her. He listened to her. He showed empathy. The two of them got married and adopted five cats. Princess Lyssa realized that money and reputation don’t matter for the first time in her life. It’s finding the right people who give you validation and acceptance and do not treat you like shit. It took her a long time to realize what really matters.
With her family far behind her, Princess Lyssa lived life with gusto. She started going to a therapist, who made her realize that the former queen had a narcissistic personality disorder. He explained that every bad thing in life was not Princess Lyssa’s fault. She made lots of friends at her school. Some of her coworkers even unofficially adopted her into their families. They treated her like the sister they never had, but they always needed in their family. They remembered her birthday. They listened to her and respected her. She even got made it to the finals two years in a row for the teacher of the year. She gained self-confidence, and even decided to go back to graduate school after Lord Justin, her friends, and her coworkers encouraged her.
And Princess Lyssa lived happily ever after.
This is a dark story. I tried to list all the triggers in the cut, but in case I missed one, please know that this could be triggering. I went on a dark path with this entry because that's where the prompt brought me, but it does have a happy ending.
Once upon a time, there was a princess. For the most part, she has a good childhood. She had a lot of friends at school. They would draw pictures for the lunch ladies and do each other’s hair during recess. She also enjoyed school, even though her ADHD and dyscalculia made it hard to learn math and stay organized. She also got along with her family. She would watch her brother, the prince, play Final Fantasy and Dragon Warriors on Nintendo while she wrote long musicals on her typewriter for her My Little Pony dolls.
Every winter, the princess’ grandparents would take her to visit Florida, where their castle was located. The princess loved going to see them. Every morning, her grandfather and her would visit the swimming pool at their estate and race each other across the room. The princess always won the swim races, but she didn’t realize that he was letting her win since she was so young. During the day, they would take the princess to Disney World, and she would ride Space Mountain with her grandpa while her grandma watched. After they came home from Disney World, grandma always let her eat Neapolitan ice cream. The strawberry was her favorite.
The royal family would take a weeklong trip to their lake castle every summer. The prince and princess would go swimming in the lake and eat lots of delicious food like fudge, ice cream sundaes, pasta, and pancakes. There were two amusement parks near the castle. At night, the royal family would walk up and down the main street of the lake town and play games. The queen and the princess spend hours in arcades trying to win tickets to get even more stuffed animals for the princess’ bedroom, while the king and prince preferred playing miniature golf.
Suddenly tragedy struck the royal family. The queen was in a horrible accident. She slipped on ice in the winter, plummeted down the stairs, and injured her knees. To help the queen, a doctor prescribed her blue pills. At the same time, the king lost his kingdom. The king and queen decided to move the princess and the prince to a nearby country called Flytena, where nobody knew them. The problem with Flytena was that the citizens of it were wealthy. They wore fancy clothes, they drove expensive cars, and they looked down on people who weren’t as rich as they were.
The former king struggled to find a new job. He was over-qualified for most jobs because he was had been a king, and nobody wanted to hire a new monarch. The queen lived in a blue pill-induced haze. The former royal family had to go on food stamps, and sometimes there would be weeks when all the princess had to eat was ramen noodles.
The former queen knew that the only way to rise up to the lifestyle that she had grown accustomed to was for the princess to marry rich. So, she started attending all the public events. At one of the events, she met a lord named Michael. Lord Michael was a successful actor, and he ran a prestigious art academy within Flytena. He also had a son that was the princess’ age named Jason. The former queen started kissing up to Lord Michael. She took the little money her family had and gave it to Lord Michael to invest in his art academy. She volunteered to be on the board of admissions at the art academy, which helped the princess be accepted at the school on scholarship. The former queen ensured all of the princess’ classes were with Jason.
The princess didn’t really like the art academy. She couldn’t sing very well, nor could she dance because she was klutzy and absentminded. She wasn’t an outstanding actress either. She got parts in all the shows and musicals because of her mother, but she didn’t enjoy it. At the same time, the former queen started inviting Lord Michael and Jason over to the house. The princess did not like Jason. He would behave perfectly when other adults were watching, but his true nature came out as soon as they went away. He was sneaky, manipulative, cunning, and a liar. He knew that he had power over the princess because of his fortune, and it wasn’t a secret that the former queen wanted her to have a future with Jason, especially when she kept finding reasons to leave the two alone together. But one day, Jason crossed the line.
The former queen and Lord Michael had gone to a board meeting for the art academy. The former king drank too much mead and had fallen asleep on the floor in front of the bedroom. The prince was making the right connections at a classmate’s birthday party. It was a late night. Jason was flipping through the cable channels when he found an adult movie. The movie had a man forcing a woman to strip while touching her in private places. Jason said he wanted to act out the film with the princess. The princess tried to say no, but Jason promised her that if she didn’t do what he wanted her to do that he would ruin her future. The princess was nine years old. Jason held her around her neck tightly with his massive forearms while he ran his other hand all over her body. He promised that he would kill her if she ever said anything.
The princess was scared. When the former queen came home from her meeting, she told her mother what had happened. Her mother called her a fucking liar and said she was just trying to get attention. The princess figured that if her own mother didn’t believe what was happening to her, nobody else would. This continued until the princess was 12.
When the princess was 12, she thought she had a small group of good friends. Unfortunately, the art academy was a small school, and everybody knew everyone. Also, in Flytena, money was the actual language of communication. During an overnight retreat for a choir tour, the princess roomed with some of her friends. Her friends thought it would be fun to play “Truth or Dare.” One girl, named Allison, asked the princess, “Truth or Dare?” The princess was afraid of choosing dare because the girls, who had already chosen dare, had been forced to do crazy things like prank call strangers flash each other body parts. One girl had even been dared to climb out of the hotel window and walk on the window ledge to visit the boy’s hotel room. Jason was staying in that hotel room. So, the princess said, “Truth.” Allison asked her about the scariest experience she had ever had.
Jason kept on touching her when they were alone together. But now that she was older and her body was more developed, he was making more demands. Now he wanted her to touch him. He also tried to penetrate her in different places with his fingers. He was also much bigger than her. When he grabbed her to hold her in place, his fingers left a huge, bruised handprint on her fair skin, and he promised to do much worse if she said anything to anyone. The princess was sick of being scared and having no support. The former queen was useless because she was strung out on too many blue pills. The former king was in a deep depression and often found himself tucking in bottles of mead instead of his own children.
On the other hand, the prince was living the perfect life. He had the correct friends, was invited to the right parties, and made the proper social connections. The princess thought that maybe if she told her friends what was happening to her, they could help her, so she told them all about being molested.
Unfortunately, her plan backfired. The girls immediately confronted Jason about what he had done to the princess. Jason denied everything she said. He said she was a loser who just wanted attention and longed to be popular. He called a slut. He told everyone she let him do things to her because she was easy. He said that her family was poor, and they didn’t care what happened to the princess if it brought them a better life. The princess ran away from the room, crying. Maybe it was her fault. Her mother thought she wanted attention, and perhaps she brought this upon herself.
As the princess got older, her life didn’t get any better. Her grades were horrible in upper school because she couldn’t focus on her classes. The affluent students who attended the academy would make fun of her in every class. They called her things like a lesbian, and boys offered her money to suck their dicks. They made fun of her clothes and her strange accent from her former life as a princess. She was a social pariah. The instructors looked the other way when these incidents happened in class because her family had no money, and without money, nothing mattered.
As soon as the former princess graduated from the art academy and went to a university, bad things started happening again. The former queen was taking more and more of her blue pills and becoming violent and angry towards her daughter. She hit, punched, and threw things at her daughter because she claimed that everything was the daughter’s fault, and that’s why the reputation was as bad as it was.
The former princess struggled through university. Her grades were horrible, and she had no drive or ambition to better herself. She tried meeting friends, but since she had no positive social role models from her childhood and adolescence, she didn’t know what a good person was and gravitated towards the first group of people that accepted her. They introduced her to drugs. She really liked drugs. She loved how they turned off her brain and made her forget how awful her life was. She enjoyed the taste of mead like her father had. It was so easy for her to just drink some mead or do some drugs and forget about life whenever something went wrong.
She had too much to drink and smoked too many things one night. She woke up naked in her dorm room surrounded by empty kegs of mead and weed remnants to the sound of cops raiding her room. All of her former friends blamed her. They said she was a druggie and a slut and would wind up living on the streets and selling her body for drug money. There were so many derogatory stories about her reputation that it didn’t matter what she said to defend herself. Finally, her father and mother had to come to the university to talk to the police. After they spoke to the police, her mother beat her and further emphasized that she was a fuck up.
The rest of university was not much better. The princess met her first boyfriend, but he didn’t come from the right “type” of family. He wasn’t much better than Jason. He was neurotic and violent. He needed to know where she was twenty-four seven. If she did something that he didn’t like, he would cut himself with razor blades, force her to look at the bleeding cuts, and tell her that she made him do that. He wasn’t violent with her, but he was violent and threw dishes at her. He also wasn’t committed to her despite his neuroticism. He cheated on her four times. She wanted to break up with him. She knew he wasn’t a good person, but at the time, he was the only person that showed her any positive affection and affirmation. She was relieved when he broke up with her for the final time for a barely legal teenager, as sad she was because they had been together for a long time.
Knowing that her family was never going to support her, she got a job working at a daycare for special needs children. One day, her mother called her and started yelling at her at work. She accused her daughter of stealing her blue pills and taking them herself. She called her daughter many things, a drug addict, a disappointment, and the worst mistake of her life. She had such a bad panic and anxiety attack that the school had to call 911.
A few days later, she returned to her job. Her coworkers showed empathy and understanding instead of telling her what a horrible person she was. They told the former princess that she deserved better. They told her how the blue pills messed with her mother’s head and sense of reality. They told her that she was intelligent and creative. They told her how amazing she was when she worked with the students. They encouraged her to go back to school. She confided in them about everything she had gone through growing up, and instead of judging her, they supported her. The princess had never heard such positive things said about her, and that’s when she realized what really mattered. In her case, it was validation.
Fifteen years later, the princess was finally living the life she had always deserved. She went back to school, got a special education degree, along with several other degrees, and graduated Magna cum laude. She moved far from her family to be a special education preschool and met a lord on her own. His name was Justin. Lord Justin encouraged Princess Lyssa to be her own person. He supported her interests, like playing video games and reading books. He was willing to try new activities to make her happy, like taking road trips and visiting foreign kingdoms. He didn’t force her to do anything she didn’t want to do. If she had a bad day, he didn’t tell her it was her fault or blame her. He listened to her. He showed empathy. The two of them got married and adopted five cats. Princess Lyssa realized that money and reputation don’t matter for the first time in her life. It’s finding the right people who give you validation and acceptance and do not treat you like shit. It took her a long time to realize what really matters.
With her family far behind her, Princess Lyssa lived life with gusto. She started going to a therapist, who made her realize that the former queen had a narcissistic personality disorder. He explained that every bad thing in life was not Princess Lyssa’s fault. She made lots of friends at her school. Some of her coworkers even unofficially adopted her into their families. They treated her like the sister they never had, but they always needed in their family. They remembered her birthday. They listened to her and respected her. She even got made it to the finals two years in a row for the teacher of the year. She gained self-confidence, and even decided to go back to graduate school after Lord Justin, her friends, and her coworkers encouraged her.
And Princess Lyssa lived happily ever after.