frogs

Do frogs really turn into princes? Yes, they do.

So now you are waiting for the anecdote where I met someone who was ugly on the outside but turned out to be beautiful on the inside. Or maybe you are waiting for the story about an annoying coworker that I learned to like when I found out the reason they were annoying was because they stayed up late every night taking care of the sick in hospital. Nope. I am going to tell you to look for your inner frog.

Inner frogs are the things you keep hidden from others. They are the parts of yourself that you don’t think are good enough for other people to see. You keep them hidden because someone taught you need to be perfect or at least fairly competent at something in order to attempt it. Or maybe you don’t want to look foolish.

I think writing is something that was an inner frog for me. One day someone asked me to write about one of my experiences. I did that and people kept asking me to write things for them. It took a long time for me to realize that I was actually pretty good at writing. I didn’t think I was that good because of the years of being in English class and seeing red ink.

Keeping special parts of ourselves hidden stifles us. We no longer live out our dreams. I know that I still have a lot of inner frogs. There are many things I was confident I could do as a child that I no longer do now. Grant you one of those things is doing cartwheels and that is probably not a good plan but I wonder how I began to think of myself as being so incapable.

When most people think of the story of the Princess and the Frog, they think of recognizing inner beauty in others. I am starting to wonder if that story is as much about the Prince as the Princess. Maybe that fable is really about the Frog remembering that he is a prince.