My Fairytale

I've given up reading Eric Berne's "What Do You Say After You Say Hello?" because he comes across as rather smug, and rarely bothers to justify his arguments except by outlining a theory, and then giving an example that fits it. While a lot of his transactional analysis work clearly is very powerful as a tool for understanding human behaviour, his claim that his version explains everything and everyone everywhere just doesn't seem supportable (and in fact, it seemed to me that a lot of his claims ended up being "if you work at it hard enough, you can make anything fit into the theory" rather than "this theory is based on the evidence and can be adapted as necessary if new evidence arises"). I found it quite interesting that Shulamith Firestone's "Dialectic of Sex" actually has several similar ideas to those in Berne's work, and they were roughly contemporary (and both influenced by Freud). However, Berne was very much not feminist (and in many ways pretty much counter-feminism), whereas Firestone was, of course, a radical feminist.

However, his discussion of how fairy tales capture or express common human life scripts was intriguing to me (though his discussion of "Little Red Riding hood" and "Little Miss Muffet" both seemed redolent of rape apologism and victim-blaming). Later in the book he talks about asking patients (as he calls his clients) to describe their lives using the language of fairy tales - frogs as losers, princes as winners, and all that sport of thing.

All of which preamble brings me to my own version of "my life as fairy tale". I have edited this slightly, because there are some aspects of my history that I do not discuss publicly and that therefore I have not included in this rendition either.

My story, then:

The Half-Fairy Boy

There was once a boy called Fay, who was the son of a woodcutter's son and a fairy princess. That made him half-fairy himself, of course. But the fairy princess had left the world of fairies to live with her man, and because they believed in their love and in what they could be, they prospered.

They made sure their baby son knew he was special, that he was half-prince, and half-fairy, and could do anything he wanted. And he knew he was special, too. He could feel it in himself.

And when he started to go to school with all the other human boys and girls, at first they could see he was special and different, too, and they liked him for it because his stories were so vibrant and colourful, the way only fairies can tell them.

But as the other children grew up, it became more important to them to know who and what you were, and where you belonged. Being special and different was a bad thing now, and they lost interest in the fairy-boy except to blame him for being different from the rest.

And Fay did not understand why he was hated. He was special, wasn't he? Hadn't he been popular once? Why no longer? He did not know how to be like the other boys, because he had never needed to learn it before, and now no one wanted to teach him.

So he just kept on trying with how special he was, but people didn't see "special", they just saw "different", and they did not know how to understand him. He couldn't be a boy any more, and he couldn't be a fairy either, because he was only ever half-fairy to begin with. So he turned into a frog instead.

And that was how he stayed, always believing he was special (though now, a special frog), but nobody seeing it but him.

But then he learned to look past the specialness and see himself as he truly was inside, beneath the frog, and the special, and see just himself. And then he knew that the specialness, though real, was never going to be enough on its own. And he stopped being a frog, and worked on being himself. Not special, but different in other ways that were also a part of being half-fairy, and that he couldn't leave behind or change, even if he wanted to. It did not make it easier, but now he knew what he had to do to cope with not being a real boy. So he got on with living without being special, but knowing he was beautiful and not a frog after all.