“Bittersweet and strange, finding you can change, learning you were wrong…”

I’m watching Beauty and the Beast with my kid, and because it’s nearly impossible for me to turn off my overly analytical brain, I had a thought about the Beast’s predicament. (Yes, I say “the Beast” as opposed to just “Beast” because that isn’t his name for cripes sake. Supposedly his actual name is Prince Adam but that’s never said in the movie. Anyway, I digress.)

The Beast and his servants have been under that enchantment, trapped in the castle, for ten years. They’ve been this way because the Beast’s behavior was inhumanly cruel (and they enabled it) — so, now they all long to be human again, which is only possible if the Beast learns to love another person and earn their love in return.

Are we expected to believe that in ten years, Belle’s father and then Belle herself are the only visitors they ever had? I highly doubt it. But before Belle gave the Beast a proper chance (being saved from a near-death experience can do that to a girl), and Beast in turn let his guard down around her, surely there were enough other visitors, even a few, and they were too put off by the Beast’s ghastliness (physical and behavioral) to try too hard. That’s my logistical thought on that, but here’s the analytical bit.

Beast couldn’t become physically human again before he became emotionally human. That much we know from the details of the enchantment.

But here’s what I know. You can’t just magically become kinder. You can’t just snap your fingers and be able to see other people as worthy of trust, or love. It takes a lot of time and it is a long process, and it’s only truly successful if you learn to see yourself as worthy of trust and love first. The Beast became a beast because the enchantment was a matter of his outsides magically turning to match his insides. The transformation he had to undergo wasn’t about finding a happily ever after with Belle. It was about learning that he could have that. It was about learning that he deserved that.

I struggle so hard with the idea that I deserve love and joy and peace. I struggle with it to the point that no matter how hard I fight to get out of survival mode, my body and brain keep trying to throw me back into it because that’s what’s familiar and therefore a perverted version of safety. Living like a beast is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everything is ugly and awful and you don’t see how it could be possible for you to get out, so instead you lean into it, and anybody who leaves or rejects you only confirms for you that this pain and suffering is the way it’s supposed to be for you. So you lean into beastliness even more. Which puts people off even more. And so on, over and over. Wash, rinse, repeat.

But if someone with enough kindness and patience manages to see through all that, and tries to give you a proper chance, and you let them…well, you just might find a way to become human again.

Everyone always says you should heal for yourself, but that isn’t usually how it works, not at first. Most beasts need someone else to be their reason to rediscover their humanity. I did. I finally found someone I wasn’t willing to lose, someone I was willing to choose over the familiar ugliness of my agony. He made me see that I could be human again, and he made me want that — first for him, and eventually for myself.

You may feel like the Beast, unworthy of love. You may be pushing people away because you think it’s supposed to be like that and it’s just as well. But it turns out that it’s bittersweet and strange, finding you can change, learning you were wrong.

Bittersweet and strange. But a beautiful tale, as old as time, in the end.