Fairytales Don’t Always Have Happy Endings

A truth.

By Snarky LisaPublished 11 months ago • 3 min read

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Life can be strange sometimes.

One moment, you could be having the time of your life. Everything seems perfect, perhaps even a heavenly sort of ethereal. Your loved ones manage to both love and respect you as a person, and nearly every interaction with the world just brightens up your day.

Alternatively, maybe your life does lowkey suck at first. It could be that you suddenly got laid off, or you have no choice but to adjust to a new life drastically different from your old one. Perhaps you lost access to a toxic but somewhat useful support network and must restart from ground zero again. Still, you have enough left to hope that things will get a lot better.

Either way, your life may feel like a fairytale at times. A story of black and white, with clarity far from being grey. However, reality is longer as well as far more complex and multifaceted than one. So even if you feel like you’re in a tale now…there might not be a happy ending.

That Prince Charming, who seems nothing but handsome and chivalrous? Chances are that he could be a sleazebag deep down who cares about no one but himself. His macho demeanour may cause a ton of unneeded collateral damage that gets covered up on the regular, with his good deeds and ostensible love for you being solely acts to feed his ego.

If he isn’t a steaming pile of trash, there’s still the possibility of your relationship going awry someday. Perhaps it could be due to miscommunication or distance. Worse yet, there’s always the chance — no matter how small — that your gallant lover could get seriously ill or die when you least expect it.

Speaking of death: everyone dies someday. While this does include abusive stepparents and tyrants, as well as other horrible people of many stripes, this also means that both your loved ones and you will eventually pass on from this world. When it comes to the bigger picture of an entire life, its true closing isn’t what would usually be considered unambiguously “happy.”

You might be among the beautiful elite one day thanks to clawing your way to the top, pampered and privileged like you feel you deserve after all the difficult battles you fought. But your victories could end up being unstable enough to get stomped on in the future, forcing you to start over at ground zero — if that’s even possible.

What’s most frustrating, perhaps, is nearly managing to complete what appears to be a real-life quest for fortune or justice — and then having that opportunity aggressively snatched away from you. It’s the feeling of ending up so close, yet so far, in the blink of an eye and the regrets that come with it.

Despite everything seeming idyllic or hopeful at first, your sense of security might simply be a tempting illusion. Even certain folktale writers of old knew this. The original Little Mermaid did die, after all, and Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood couldn’t escape her wolf in the end.

However, this doesn’t mean all must be lost for you forever. With time and effort, you can still achieve satisfying — if not wonderful — things in life. Sure, you may not be able to regain what you have lost in the past. Perhaps you will still bear the emotional and/or physical scars of your trauma for the rest of your life.

While reality is far from being like the realms of fairytales and exquisite folklore, it does not have to be doom and gloom at all times. Because hope does and should exist. It just needs to be tempered with caution as well.

Any other thoughts on this? Let me know in the comments!