Social Anxiety is a nightmare. Especially when you’re a person that knows deep within your soul that you have a calling in life to help people.
How do you help people when being close to them terrifies you?
Well, that was the question I was trying to answer when PrincessForADay was born.
My albeit short experience through life thus far has taught me some very valuable lessons, and I’ve dealt with some unique challenges. Looking back, I’m very grateful for the challenges I’ve had to face, because they have made me a much BETTER person in every sense of the word. Hindsight is always 20/20. In the moment, it just feels like you’re going through hell, and all you can do is just try to keep going.
I suffered through a great deal of mental pain and anguish through my very personal struggles with mental health. Years of my life, in my mind, have been completely wasted as a result of my poor mental health, and those years seem to weigh on me constantly, reminding me that I have so much wasted time and potential to make up for.
But even after I started my very long journey to recovery from my mental illness, I have struggled to shake this social anxiety, which prevents me from reaching out and accomplishing most of my goals. It clings to me like a shadow, a reminder of my “defectiveness” everywhere I seem to turn.
Towards the beginning of this past summer, as my intense depression started to lift, it was almost as if I was seeing the world through a whole different lens. It was literally as if I had been living in a completely different world, made up of pale shades of blue, gray, and black. Now, it’s as if the entire world is lit up with a rainbow of colors, and exploring the wonders of the earth have given me so much joy.
I started to spend more and more time out in Nature, because that’s where I simply felt the best, the most like “myself” than I had felt since I was in high school. But as a 26 year-old adult, I also have a completely new set of knowledge and experiences, and suddenly life was so RICH. Being around Nature began to ease my anxiety. I made friends with the trees. I’ve learned so many incredible lessons from their silent wisdom.
Wildflowers became the metaphor for my life: they withstood the broils of nature, they handled all the storms life threw at them, and they were beautiful. They flourished and they grew. They were WILD. They knew how to survive.
I wanted to be like my photosynthetic friends. I wanted to be resilient and beautiful and full of wisdom. The more time I spent surrounded by nature, the more comfortable I felt leaving the safety of my tiny one-room haven, and I soon began to spend as much time as I could surrounded by nature, in any type of way, Whether it was a giant grassy field, a dense deciduous forest, broad expanses of rows of cornfields, or my personal favorite, in a prairie heaven surrounded by tall grasses and wildflowers. Different types of wildflowers everywhere you turn. Soaking in their beauty was healing my soul.
One day, I thought, “These are just so BEAUTIFUL! I wish I could share these with the entire world!” And I started taking pictures. My amateur photography hobby has come only from being exposed to the beauty of Mother Nature herself; I just happen to be there at that moment to capture it in a photo.
As I began to share my photography, I wished I could share my experience with these wildflowers more tangibly, in a way that I could physically share my experience with others. There were just two problems: These flowers would only last for about a day without water/on a crown, and my tricky social anxiety was not going to let the human interaction part happen. I had to think of some type of way to share this beauty with people. I just HAD to share these beautiful wildflowers, who had impacted me and healed me so deeply, and I knew that they could impact other people so deeply, too, even if their beauty only DID last a day. One day is 24 hours worth of memories! That seemed worth it to me.
One day I decided to pick some flowers from the field behind my house, and I happened to come up with a flower crown! “Is this too ‘hippy’?” I thought to myself, as I completely embraced the beautiful feeling that wearing the crown filled me with. I had connected my healing wildflowers with something I could actually WEAR! My imagination was delightfully tickled, and I honestly felt special wearing that flower crown, like a true Princess of Mother Nature.
I don’t know what it is about these crowns, but I’m telling you, you can’t help but feel like a Princess as soon as you put one on! (I think there are many people by now who can attest to this). So I knew I HAD to share these crowns somehow. But who else besides my hippy/bohemian 26-year-old self would want a flower crown?
That’s when I remembered being a little girl. I was the youngest child in my family, with four older brothers. Being particularly shy and sensitive anyway, I felt a lot of lonely moments as a kid, where I would get LOST in books about magic and fantastical things that could never actually happen in real life. But I always ALWAYS wondered, “What if!?” What if magical things really COULD happen in real life? Somehow that thought, that “hope” you could almost call it...was a friend during lonely times. Imagination and wonder and pondering were the foundations of my childhood, and no matter how much I knew magic wasn’t “real,” I still always sensed, back when I was little, that that MIGHT not be the entire story.
All of this came together magically itself. Suddenly the idea clicked in my mind, and PrincessForADayWashingtonIL was born, even if not fully recognized yet. I knew I had discovered a way to help people, and the most important type of people (in my opinion): little kids! I was going to be the person that brought magic to life for them, by placing this flower crowns around town in places where kids would be able to “magically” find them.
I was SO excited at my first attempt. I got up early and made the crown (which was still not a perfected/easy process at that point), took the fruits of my labor to the park, laid it neatly on a bench near the playground, found a spot to sit back and watch, and waited. I waited for hours! And not a single child showed up. I left the crown, my hopes a bit deflated, but hoping that someone would still find it after I left and have some fun with it.
The next day, armed and ready with two more laboriously-made crowns, I excitedly went to the park to see if the crown was still there. I was hoping NOT to find it, meaning someone had used it for its intended purpose and kept it to play with it! I looked around, and I indeed found the crown, wilted and sad-looking, on a pile of trash in the garbage can.
I was devastated! How could someone throw away something that was clearly intended for children to play with it at the park! But then I realized, maybe it wasn’t really so clear after all.
Before I left the two crowns that day, I luckily had some paper and a pen in my purse, and I was able to attach a note reading, “You have been chosen to be a Princess for a day!” to both of the crowns. I hid them around the playground, and again, found a spot to wait.
I was beginning to really lose hope after a couple hours went by, and still no one had shown up to the park. I was starting to think maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all. After all, they were only going to look pretty for a day, and if no one found them, what was the point? I was just getting ready to leave, when a BUSLOAD of daycare children piled onto the playground. I excitedly watched from a distance as the kids eventually found both of the crowns that I had hidden. I saw the first girl’s confused face at first, then she read the note, and ran as fast as she could to her daycare teacher, with a huge smile on her face. The daycare teachers read the note, decided it was ok, and let the little girl wear it. I will never forget that smile on her face! I KNEW for a fact that I had just made that little girl’s day. Another girl found the other one not long after, with a similar experience. At that point, all the kids were gathering around to look at them. Those two girls looked and felt like real Princesses. I couldn’t have been more satisfied with the result!
I quickly made a facebook page so that people would know I was a legit source and not just some creepy person trying to lure kids away! I wanted to make it very clear that it was just purely out of love and wanting to brighten a little kid’s day. So PrincessForADayWashingtonIL was officially born.
Those daycare teachers ended up posting the very first pictures on my page, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled. IT WAS WORKING!!!!!! And I even got to see it sometimes when people were generous enough to take a picture when they found it, and post it to the page.
It became a very cathartic experience for me throughout the whole summer. Ups and downs with anxiety and emotions are always an issue for me still, but having something I could say I was doing to actually GIVE something back to the world after those wasted years of mental illness was a steadying force in my life. It was something I could look forward to every day, but it completely depended on my own effort.
I was forced to confront a lot of my fears. Sometimes, I even started walking directly up to people and offering the crowns. The confidence I felt from the plethora of smiles I knew I had caused gave me the courage to expand my comfort zone. I got so much more comfortable around people through this whole process.
Every single picture posted to my page means the world to me, but even when they don’t respond that they’ve found it, I can only imagine the joy and fun and imagination some little kid is having with it, and it has nothing to do with facebook or the internet. And that thought makes me just as happy!
I intend to continue this project as far into the season as the wildflowers allow. As with everything in life, Nature is seasonal. I have watched with awe as the flowers from early summer have died and the plants of late summer have started to take their place. It’s absolutely jaw-dropping to me that so much life JUST HAPPENS! Without any human intervention at all, the wild continues to be wild. I’m excited to continue watching how Nature develops and unfolds as the seasons change.
I know the time is soon coming that the first freeze will hit, and all the wildflowers will be gone. I plan on making crowns until that day! And hopefully by the time all the snow melts and the sun starts to shine and grow and nourish new life again, those wildflowers will be back, and if I’m still around, so will PrincessForADayWashingtonIL.
To see SO MANY MORE of the beautiful princesses we've had this summer, visit PrincessForADayWashingtonIL on Facebook! :)
https://www.facebook.com/PrincessForADayWashingtonIL/
Love,
Jessi <3
