The Princess and the Pea
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the fairytale The Princess and the Pea quite often. It’s a story about a prince who wants to marry a true princess. In his quest to find his true companion, he thinks of a test. He lays down 20 mattresses on top of each other with, at the bottom, a single pea. The girl who could feel the pea would be his princess, since she’d be sensitive enough to pass his test. Hundreds of girls fail this test, with each and every one of them sleeping a full night. Until one night, a girl stands in front of his castle, fully soaked because of the heavy rain. She looks like a wet dog but tells him she’s actually a princess looking for shelter. His mother and he decide to let her sleep on the heavily padded bed, with the single pea somewhere at the bottom. The next morning, they ask her how she slept, and surprisingly, she tells them she had an awful night’s sleep. She was bruised and told them something was poking her back and hurting her a lot. It was the pea. This meant she was truly a princess – and they lived happily ever after.
This story has popped up in my head a lot for the past few weeks. Not because I’ve been sleeping awfully badly at night myself. No, the reason is the damn pea.
There’s a pea somewhere in my bed. I can feel it every moment of every day. I’m happy, but I’m feeling the pea. I’m sad, because I’m feeling the pea. No amount of bedding could ease the pain that that minuscule green vegetable ball brought me. The pea was disrupting my entire existence, and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me where it was. At first, I just tried to ignore the pea. I thought I was being overly sensitive and blamed myself for my inability to rest at night. I told myself to suck it up and add an extra mattress. I compared myself to other people who seemed to be sleeping just fine. If they could do it, why couldn’t I? I told myself that there must have been something terribly wrong with me. Every day that passed, I became more uncomfortable in my life and my skin. The pea disrupted my peace to such an extent that, finally, I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. Everything felt completely off.
After months of discomfort, I finally acknowledged the pea. There must be a reason why I’m feeling it so much – it’s a message waiting to be deciphered. Determined to find it, I shook up my bed countless times. I took my magnifying glass and inspected the entire bedding. I wasn’t going to give up until I found it, because I was absolutely sure the pea was trying to tell me something.
It turned out that small vegetable was a metaphor for something massive. Firstly, I found out that being able to feel that pea wasn’t the weakness I told myself it was. The fact that I was able to feel a pea through all those layers of denial and bedding meant that I was extremely in tune with my heart’s and soul’s desires. My sensitivity was no longer a weakness – it became my strength. It meant that my deepest truths couldn’t be ignored, no matter how hard I tried. That meant that my long and painful journey of self-discovery and inner alignment in the years prior wasn’t for nothing. The second step of this process, apart from acknowledging the existence of the pea (my sensitivity) and embracing it, was to find where it was and decipher the message of it. What was that God-awful, always-lingering feeling of unease that was poking from under my stack of mattresses? And what on Earth could I do to find it? I was ready to hire a private investigator at this point, out of sheer desperation.
That was until someone reminded me of a deeper truth I had forgotten: What you seek is seeking you, and everything can be found within. So I sat with myself in silence. I took a deep breath and relaxed. I felt my shoulders relaxing and my jaw unclenching as I kept on breathing. When I felt I was fully relaxed, I turned inwards and asked myself about the pea. The answer came to me immediately: fear is your pea.
Fear is my pea. The lingering feeling of impending doom, no matter how good my situation was at the moment. The feeling that everything could turn for the worse at any moment. The fear that none of my dreams will come true, and my life will be nothing more than a series of hardships. The fear of inadequacy in handling said hardships. Essentially, I was afraid of life. I was afraid that, because of my sensitivity, I wasn’t fit for this life. I was afraid that by giving in to the feeling of the pea poking in my back and acknowledging those fears, they would become real. Then it would no longer be a secret, deep fear, but a reality.
What surprised me was that this whole situation turned out to be a paradox. Our paradoxical nature isn’t necessarily a surprise to me, but when I find myself deep down in the abyss of another awakening, I tend to forget this. The irony of the pea was that feeling the pea was my fear. I saw it as a shortcoming, which would result in the inevitable failure I was so terrified of. All while the opposite was true – my ability to feel the pea, and therefore my sensitivity, was my power. It was the reason why I don’t have to have any fears. It’s the reason for my existence.
At last, she embraced the pea. She thanked the pea. She loved the pea. The pea disappeared.
And she lived happily ever after.
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