Over the course of my posts, my apparent love for chic flicks and any other Walt Disney production must have become pretty obvious. And today, I will be drawing a lesson from yet another one of these movies; The Princess Diaries.
This movie is about a socially awkward teenage girl who had a meagre existence, barely having scratched past the bare surface of life, just existing at the blurry edges of life; always floating about and never fully fitting in. Her world is turned on its head when her paternal grandmother turns up at her and her single mom’s bleak apartment, and drops the mother of bombshells. That she is in fact a princess, her long lost father, whom she had never met, having had been the king of a little unknown but beautiful country known as Genovia, before his untimely death.
Fast forward through all the denial and chaos and confusion, Mia, our newly self-aware princess is in line to take over the throne from her grandmother whose time on the throne is up. I had mentioned that Mia was socially awkward, and so having a crown on her head did nothing to abate this. She is the queen klutz and makes a fool of herself on so many occasions, in front of all the royals of Genovia and other states. So when it is finally time to ascend to the throne and make a rightful claim to it, she feels that she is not ready to be acknowledged as the ruler of anything, let alone anyone. And so she plans to run away, leave all the madness and royal fuss behind. Just as she is about to leave, she stumbles upon a letter from her deceased father which puts things in a different perspective.
The letter reads, ‘Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather, the judgement that something else is more important than the fear. The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all. From now on, you will be travelling the road between who you think you are, and who you can be. The key is to allow yourself to make the journey.
This particular segment of the film edifies on the importance of courage. That it is not wrong to be afraid; because without fear, there is no courage. We must simply choose that, which is more important than, fear. To read more posts by Anne, click HERE
