Somebody once told me

Somebody once told me that their parents read bedtime stories and sung lullabies to sooth them to sleep. That was never my experience though. As a child, I had an excessively active imagination and my thoughts were forever racing back and forth. It was this that would so often stop me from dozing off. Instead, I would lie awake at night and cry, tormented by my mind. I was the prince trapped in the tower, my thoughts were the dragons guarding me, and my saviour came in the form of an Ogre.

I had asked for a small television with a VHS player in the front for Christmas, and I received that very thing on December 25th 2003. I won the first video I ever owned in a race against my siblings. Shrek. Now, I was never the sharpest tool in the shed, but luckily, I could work the television, and every night for 200 days I watched this movie. It would ease me to sleep in a way nothing else could. My thoughts were always lost in the mountains, but Shrek was the road on which my thoughts could follow, and every night I couldn't wait to get on the road again. Without it, I felt as though the ice beneath my feet was getting pretty thin, and that I was one step away from drowning.

Stories are like onions, they have many layers, and children respond to them in various ways. Each and every story can mean something entirely different for every child. Shrek, though forever a meme, not only saved me from an all-encompassing sense of existential dread, but also taught me a lot about the world. It taught me that it didn’t make sense not to live for fun; that sometimes things are more than they appear; and that when the water is getting warm, you might as well swim. I learned that external beauty is meaningless in the face of true love, and that who we are, and how willing we are to help others, even when we don’t want to, determines our true value. I learned that living a peaceful life is a fine thing to desire, and though we can expect there to be challenges, we should tackle them head on.

Shrek is a story about friendship and love, and how a good set of friends will stick by your side no matter what. I found this to be true. Donkey, Fiona, Shrek and all of the other characters proved to me that the differences between us can be a unifying force, and that the world is a better place when we accept each other for who we are. Each and every one of us is unique in our own way, and we are strongest together. It did not blind me to the evils of the world however, instead, it convinced me that evil can be overcome.

I know this all sounds a little silly, but to a young boy in his bedroom all those years ago: this meant everything. It saved him from the demons in the night and from the loneliness that he felt so deeply within his heart. Stories are truly special because they resonate with us on a fundamentally human level, and they connect us through invisible threads that leave everlasting impressions. For me, it didn’t stop at Shrek. I repeated this pattern for many years with many different stories, and to this day I look back with fondness at the hundreds of hours I spent in my room alone at night, watching them. Imagine how differently I would view those years now had I not found solace in a silly story about an Ogre and his swamp.