Like every other fairy tale, the story of Penelope begins Once Upon a Time. It takes shape with a Curse. It finds resolution in True Love. And it ends with a Happily Ever After. But although Penelope’s story is classic fairy tale in more ways than one, in so many others it is a brand new take on the whole thing.

Like Beauty and the Beast, Penelope begins with a well-off man, a not so well-off woman, and his grievous mistake of rejecting her based on her existence outside of his own privileged circle. As luck would have it, the mother of the young woman just happens to the town witch. And as the story goes, she sets a curse upon the young man so that he might understand that value lies beyond social status and appearance. But where the Beast’s lesson begins and ends with him, the curse of the Wilhern family does not even appear until several generations later. And when it does, it is the young Penelope who must bear it and bring the same ancient lesson to the modern world in which she lives.

You see, Penelope is born with a pig’s nose. It cannot be removed. It cannot be easily hidden. And according to the curse, it will only disappear when Penelope is loved by “one of her own kind.”

So her parents decide to do the only thing that they can do. They secretly her away. They fake her death. And they raise her hidden from the world and its judgments until she is finally old enough to find love and break the curse.

Cue the mission to find a man who will marry Penelope and break the curse. Enter dozens of blue-blooded bachelors who run in the opposite direction as soon as they set eyes on Penelope. And pause on the reality that all Penelope’s life has been up to this day is waiting to be free of her curse.

As Penelope herself puts it, her mother has been preparing her to be a bride for as long as she can remember. Over and over, her mother tells Penelope that she is not herself: she is her great-great-grandfather; the real her is just waiting inside to get out. And once that real her does, well, then she can actually start living.

But as the one man who doesn’t immediately run from Penelope asks Penelope, “What if the curse isn’t broken? What if it’s never broken?”

And in the face of that reality, Penelope must consider her answer. At first she tells him, “I’ll kill myself.” And looking back on how she has been raised, her answer makes perfect sense. If all of your life has been lived in pursuit of one single thing, if all your life you’ve been told you can’t start living until you get that one thing, logic tells you that without that one thing, you might as well be dead anyway.

And although I can’t say I spent the first twenty five years of my life waiting to get rid of a pig’s nose, I have to say that Penelope’s dilemma is not all that unfamiliar. As I see it, the curse of waiting is one that plagues more of us than we would like to admit. In our minds, it sounds something like I will be happy/whole/successful, when I lose weight, become a doctor, get married, etc. In our hearts, its whispered words could easily be I will be unhappy/ unsuccessful/unlovable, until I get in better shape, become a CEO, have children, etc. And although it’s not a witch’s curse, a poison-induced sleep, or an imprisoning tower, for all intents and purposes the simple thought that we cannot live, are not whole, and are not lovable until we complete a certain task, obtain a certain thing, or become a certain way can keep us from living just as much as any cursed princess in all of fairytale history.

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