How Sailor Moon Impacted My Life

For 30 years, this cosmic crybaby has warmed the hearts of many people inspired others, and still never fails to give people, courage, strength, and love. You could throw a dart at any movie, TV Show, or author that Sailor Moon has inspired.

Everyone has their own story about how this anime impacted them. And this is mine.

What Sailor Moon Did For Me

when I was five years old, I was acclimating to a new life after spending years in the hospital from the treatment for leukemia. After I was successfully cured from cancer. A new life began for me that I was not sure about. In my infancy, I was in the hospital, and all I had were my Barbie dolls, my Disney princesses, and many VHS tapes.

I was young enough to know that I felt lonely without knowing what it meant. The friends I had were gone. I did not have any friends in my neighborhood because I was in the hospital. I didn’t have the typical infancy that many kids would have because I was fighting for my life. As you can imagine when I started kindergarten, I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t know what to do every day I came home from school. I felt empty even though I did not know what that felt like yet.

In the afternoons I would wait for my mom at my grandparents while she finished her shift at work. My grandmother told me that I could watch TV. It's a no-brainer, I’m going to Cartoon Network something new to watch.

...and then a program came on that changed my life, TOONAMI.

I saw the title that said Sailor Moon and I knew I was hooked before I even got through the opening. It checked the box on everything that I loved with fantasy stories about girls with magical powers. That’s all it took for me.

It gave me something to look forward to every day. I got home from school. It wasn’t just the joy of getting to watch this middle schooler fight evil by the Moonlight and (sometimes) win love by daylight. It fueled my imagination. I had ideas for characters that had magical powers. There were times at recess I would run around and pretend I was a Sailor scout in my own world that was mine.

Sailor Moon came on right at the time for me to have a character that I could look up to, but also to relate to. I knew at five years old that she had her flaws. She gets emotional at the drop of a hat, but if she did something wrong she admits it. If she knows someone is in trouble, she doesn't hesitate to get there with--or without powers.

To see that kind of morale in a middle schooler-aged character is still admirable and I'm glad to have seen that quality in the shows I ingested.

She wasn’t perfect, but she was flawed to a perfect degree.

We didn’t have many characters back, then that we could relate to when you’re going into something new. For me that was going through school. Even though most of the plot of the story went one ear and out the other, there were still some elements to the show that did show the greatest lessons that a litle girl like me needed to hear and the 28 year old finally got.

that it’s OK to be scared during change.

Your emotions are valid.

With these healthy elements that I saw for me to understand as a child. It carried me through the thing I feared the most, and that was school. I have to admit that sometimes I’d imagine the characters were right beside me and I felt stronger and I felt like I could get through the day.

In my graduating days from school, I got the best graduation gift

It was a birthday/graduation combo gift. In all the years I cosplayed, I got to bring it to a full circle to dress up from my first anime love of my life.

The anime has been with me through the toughest moments of childhood. But then it was there for me in the toughest change of my life. The death of my grandmother.

I felt that void again that I could understand better than when I was five. But it understood it in a way that challenged me to know that I had to accept this change as much as it hurts me. I was encouraged by my family to get back into conventions.

A dear friend of mine helped me immensely with purchasing a costume of one of my favorite characters, Sailor Venus. Dressing up from that series helped in that first year I went through navigating life as an adult. I dressed up as that character so much that I was given the nickname of Venus and many people knew this was my favorite character to dress up at.

But not many knew why I dressed up as her. Not many knew I was going through a rough transition of my life and this character became a staple for helping me through that rough transition into adulthood.

But it wasn't just Sailor Venus and Sailor Mars that I dressed up as. There was...

Princess Serenity

Neo Queen Serenity

Princess Venus

And then finally

Sailor Moon Herself

Sailor Moon had the balance of being a show that was young enough for children, but not too mature for children. I’ve always said in my episodes on my show The Screen Queen that kids are hungry for information to broaden their horizons and who better than the characters that they follow. Sailor Moon led by example that she didn’t have the answers for life, but she had a good attitude about life. And really one life is all doom and gloom. You have to have a good attitude to go into anything in your life. And that followed me for years.