Storming The Castle
On unsolved wounds, restless nights, and learning to dismantle the tower.
Life isn’t the fairytale you hope it will be. Young girls with dead mothers are supposed to become a Princess, but I’ve always been more of the type to storm the castle.
As far back as I can remember, my family has called me unfair. They told me I needed to quit blabbing my mouth and made jokes about me having Social Services on speed dial. (Here’s the truth: I didn’t. I never called them. Not once.)
Sometimes they’d ask me how I did it, how I talked back with boundaries and didn’t allow myself to be dealt within that way. But they never acknowledged how I kept saying, This is not right. This is not the way it is supposed to be. Instead, they moved against me without hesitation, like birds drawn into formation, united only in declaring me the problem.
My mom was always worried that I’d leave her there and fade away. Her finally words to me were delivered post mortem as a birthday card written with precision in her unique cursive, “Thank you for staying.” So I did. I stayed. I overstayed my welcome just like she said I always did. For 21 more years I stayed in the center of the threat, the criticism and the weight of being a princess convinced her role in life was to save everyone else in the castle if only she could get to them.
My mom had this way of instilling guilt for her own terror — accusing me of not caring, of being willing to just leave her behind as if she would be alone. The enmeshment of it never once confused me. Not at the time. Only now do I think to myself, Don’t you have Dad? Perhaps I knew not to ask then. Perhaps I knew none of us had Dad to feel truly held by — not even her.
She knew if I left, I’d never speak to any of them ever again, and yet she was never fully able to admit why that was the case. The flock flew and she stayed in the nest, wings over me. Separated. Protected from things only she knew and stories she took with her to the grave.
As I sat there holding that last birthday card adorned with snowmen singing a happy tune, it was no question that I would continue to stay. For her. But one can be given the threat of loneliness only a few hundred times before they know deeply that the loneliest thing of all would be to stay here, with them all.
There are years of my life that are blank — not a single unprompted memory between ages four and twelve. I can tell you the view of my grandmother’s apartment from two feet high, but nothing of my own from those years.
What I do remember is my mom’s eyes gone wild as she shoved me full-fisted, hissing, “We don’t talk about these things!” I remember her saying, “If your life is so awful…” with the mixed threat of leaving me wherever we were at the time and showing me just how much worse it could get. She told me to be thankful for my family. She told me I didn’t know how good I had it. She wanted me to be grateful to her for saving me from foster homes and mental wards, as if going to those places was always a fault of my own. Only now do I fully understand how a twelve-year-old doesn’t hold the capacity to want to go anywhere else but to a place that is both here and also better.
I believed the world would swallow me alive if I didn’t fall in line.
The night my mom died, I wondered if she did it on purpose. Fifteen minutes earlier she had still been there, talking, exasperated in the way only mothers and teenage daughters can be. She said her usual “You’ll be sorry” and then, with an extra beat, gave me the words she mostly only ever wrote: “I love you.”
She waited. I said nothing.
Fifteen minutes later, she was gone.
It took decades for me to admit to myself that I wondered if she had a choice and in that choice she thought to herself, “You’ll be sorry.” Maybe I’m right. Maybe I’m wrong and it is just one more completely awful thing to say about family. But it is my truth. It is what I know. It is something so believable to me that for the ten years after her death I swung like a violent pendulum in believing she died a Saint and being unable to forgive her for the work she left undone.
So no, life is not a fairytale.
Even if you have the dream job and the perfectly supportive partner. Even if the dress finally fits and you have what they’re calling “lady abs” tucked away under your Boss Babe attire. Even as I stand in glass offices overlooking highways and mountain views. Even as the phone buzzes with likes, rave reviews, and new followers — even then, the voice may whisper: maybe they were right about you.
That doesn’t sound very princess-like, does it? But here’s the kicker: only the princess can save herself.
I spent so much of my young adult life waving wildly in the air hoping to be saved by someone, anyone that I couldn’t realize all that movement was digging me in deeper. It was only when I became still that I could begin to imagine a way out.
So yes, I am a princess. But not the kind anyone imagines. On Monday, I was scrubbing floors on my knees. By Friday, I was expected to waltz — innocent, gracious, smiling like I had never touched a rag. The tiara looked like power, but it was only costume jewelry for a part I didn’t believe in.
The movies won’t show you the ever-after. They fade to black after the kiss, leaving you to imagine everything worked out cleanly. But even in your new life, the same old stories surface. Unsolved wounds do not vanish just because you’ve found the partner, the job, the house, the perfect body, the curated feed. Trauma has a way of seeping through the cracks, showing up in arguments, anxieties, and old habits in the middle of what was supposed to be your happily ever after.
Like the princess and the pea, I learned to stop stacking mattresses in order to not feel what it was that was keeping me restless in my life. Instead, I took the mattresses down — one, by one, by one. I examined each of them for what they were and when I found the pea. With practice, I was able to hold it long enough to know how to set it aside without fear of it rolling back or going bad elsewhere in my life.
I stopped putting on the tiara as a way of believing I had power, and eventually, I went back. I went back to the tower. I stormed every castle I’d ever found myself trapped in.
And while you already know that storming your own castles is part of the story, while so many inspiring writers out there will write that you have to do this, I have yet to find anyone who has explained how to take the first step and then the next. I’ve never met anyone that says how to go beyond the surface, to move with what seems obvious until it is a part of your deepest Knowing and go beyond the fake-it-till-you-make-it blame-shame and forceful task-list of having to be something you’re not in order to get something you need.
At the cusp of good advice, we all start with the same question, Ya, but how?
And the answer is simple, though not easy: with practice.
This is a very real story woven together as something more easy to relate to. If this story helps you ignite a sense of self-understanding, please let me know. Drop me a comment below.
Whatever came up for you while reading this, I want you to write freely about it now using The BeMo Practice & FUNCK Method at the front of your BeMo Journal.
As inspiration to get started with your Flow, here are some journal prompts to begin. As you complete this prompt, take the time to move through the FUNCK Method one by one. Give yourself time. Allow for space. And always, don’t forget to end back in the here and now with gratitude, enoughness, and self-recognition in your Positives prompt.
BeMo Journal Prompts
What is the “pea under the mattress” in your life right now — the thing you keep stacking distractions or defenses on top of? How might you begin to peel those layers back, one by one?
Think of a time when you believed changing your circumstances (job, relationship, appearance) would fix the feeling inside. What surfaced again despite the change? What does that tell you about what still needs your attention?
If you were the princess in your own story — the one scrubbing floors one day and waltzing the next — what castle do you need to storm, and what would “saving yourself” look like?
