In 1993, when I was thirty-two years old, I experienced something that resembled a breakdown. Burnout, we’d call it now, but the term wasn’t used so much back then. I was stuck in a corporate job I loathed—stuck, because in a depressed housing market we had a property in negative equity, so there seemed to be no way out of my situation that wouldn’t land me in debt—and also because I was then married to a man who didn’t much feel obliged to work, so that the weight of it all fell on me.
My situation was complicated by my fear of returning to childhood poverty and a lifelong fear of failure, and if I abandoned a promising career on a seeming whim, I would for sure be considered, by my family and peers, to have failed. But at the heart of my intense psychological distress was the growing realization that my occupation didn’t in any single way reflect the person I’d always imagined I would become. I was not only inhabiting but actively facilitating a world in which profit was everything. I was supposed to be better than this. I was supposed to be living in a different story—but irritatingly, I had no idea at the time what that different story might look like.
I didn’t know who to be instead, and I was a person who had always needed a solid plan before I could take a single step—because if you had a plan, you could be reasonably sure that you were in control of your own destiny, and I feared loss of control, too. I feared many intangible things when I was thirty-two years old, as well as a good few highly tangible ones.
One Sunday afternoon, leafing listlessly through the pages of a lovely old illustrated edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales in a vain effort to introduce some enchantment into my world—because tomorrow was Monday, and that meant the start of another long week in the job I’d grown to abhor, so Sundays were always dominated by a sense of impending doom—I came across a story that I’d never previously paid any attention to. It was called “The Girl Without Hands.”
Sometimes, the stories you need arrive right on time and change everything—and there was no doubt that I needed this one.
It’s a long and complex story, but it proceeds roughly like this. A miller has fallen on hard times, so he makes a deal with the Devil, who offers him great riches in return for whatever is standing now behind his mill. The miller, rather oddly, imagines that the Devil has a hankering for the solitary apple tree that grows at the back of the mill—but he doesn’t realize that his daughter is standing in front of the tree. When the Devil comes back to take the daughter away, though, he can’t, because she is too pure: her hands are too clean. So the Devil orders the father to cut off his daughter’s offending hands. The miller, afraid that the Devil will take him instead if he doesn’t, and with his daughter’s agreement, complies. But the daughter’s copious tears flow onto her bleeding stumps and they remain clean, so the Devil still can’t take her. He stomps off into the forest in a temper.
The father offers to keep the now-handless maiden in splendor for the rest of her life, made possible by his newly acquired riches. But the girl refuses and tells him she can no longer stay there. She sets off into the forest where, starving, she eventually happens upon a beautiful garden full of inaccessible pear trees. With the help of an angel, she manages to eat some of the fruit, then meets and marries the kind king who owns the trees. He provides her with a pair of silver hands, which are more pleasing than her stumps, but purely ornamental. The king goes off to war, and the new queen gives birth to a son.
But in a further deception orchestrated by the Devil, the king’s mother is ordered to kill the queen and her child. Instead, to keep the handless maiden safe, her mother-in-law sends her away and she heads back into the forest. There, she meets the angel again and is led to a small house. On the house is a sign with the words: Here, all dwell free. Cared for by a “snow-white virgin” who lives in the house, she stays there for seven years, and during that time, her hands slowly grow back. In the meantime, the king has returned and set out on a years-long journey to look for his lost wife, and eventually the family is reunited.
Sometimes, the stories you need arrive right on time and change everything—and there was no doubt that I needed this one. In my head, I was the girl without hands, bleeding from my stumps, wandering alone through a harsh world in which I seemed to have no place to properly belong.
Like her, though for rather less pure reasons, I’d been complicit in my own dismemberment by the greedy patriarchy. I’d been severed from my soul, though there was part of me that hadn’t entirely given myself over, that had kept my stumps clean. That knew there was something more.
So why did this fairy tale speak to me so strongly? What did it show me that I needed to be shown? That for some of us, healing comes in the forest, not in the world—and I longed for the cool, dark quiet of that wild place with all my heart. That false hands, no matter how kindly given, just don’t work; you have to put in the time to grow real ones. That you always need the help of an angel or two: no matter how self-reliant you’ve had to grow up to be, you can’t do it alone. That above all, and whether or not you have a plan, sometimes you just have to go. You just have to gather the fraying threads of your courage—or your desperation—and set out on a new journey. That’s the only way you’ll find the orchard of ripe fruit that you need. You have to have faith in the story; it’s the only way you’ll find the haven in the woods where you can grow your own hands back. Where you finally might learn to dwell free.
There is no right way to live a good life. At least, not according to received wisdom in the secular twenty-first-century West. There are no approved rules, other than the rules we each might decide will work for us. This usually means that we must “go our own way,” “be whoever we want to be,” “live our own truth,” and be sure we’re not dependent on anyone else for “validation.” We are each to be our only source of wisdom and moral authority, there’s no universal narrative to which we all belong, and the ailing planet is merely a backdrop without agency against which we dance alone. Individuality trumps all.
The devices we are constantly plugged into encourage us to exist in predominantly virtual worlds and to belong, if we choose to belong at all, to predominantly virtual communities—as a consequence of which, we’ve forgotten how to build proper relationships and responsibilities. We have instant access to information, and AI to do the difficult stuff for us, so why bother learning at all? There are no enforceable parental controls, there’s no authentic and grounded moral guidance, and there’s nothing to stop us doing whatever we want—no matter how foolish or harmful it’ll turn out to be, in the end.
Fairy tales, then, can shine a light on both inner and outer experience, and show us what it might look like to be deeply rooted in our own life.
This particular brand of freedom is clearly not serving us well, though, because one set of statistics after another continues to tell us that our mental health and wellbeing are plummeting in an alarming way. For a couple of decades now, rates of anxiety, depression, suicide and self-harm have been rising sharply in countries throughout the West—and in people of all classes, races and educational levels. This trend accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath.
Something about modern life, then, is making us miserable. We appear to have limitless choices, but they’re only making us afraid. It’s not really surprising: the old story of progress that has defined our lives for so long has evidently failed us, and the structures and belief systems that have held our world together are crumbling away. Even those of us who aren’t actively breaking still feel the malaise. We feel that the world should be different—that we should be different.
But our culture no longer tells us anything substantial about who we should be instead, or—beyond media reporting on the cause célèbre of the day—what our beliefs and values should be instead. We have nothing to say to young people about how they should live, or more importantly, what their lives mean. In an increasingly chaotic and often terrifying world, we have no anchors, no rootedness, no sense of a common purpose. We have no shared stories which advise us how to journey through this challenging life and these challenging times and emerge not only intact, but flourishing.
Or do we?
When contemporary culture fails to provide meaningful stories for us to live by, I always find myself drawn to consult the timeless wisdom encoded in our old myths and fairy tales. When I was a small child, they made more intuitive sense to me than anything else I read, and when as an adult I came eventually to the practice of psychology, they always helped to clarify the issues and dilemmas that my clients faced, and in ways that never failed to fill me with awe. As ‘The Girl Without Hands’ showed me during my own time of need, just because they’re old doesn’t mean they’re irrelevant. The vivid image of the dismembered girl growing back her own hands in the deep, enchanted forest lodged itself into my heart that Sunday—where it can still surface in times of doubt today—and the narrative helped me to understand what I needed to do.
I needed simply to walk away, and trust that I’d discover the ripe fruit that would nourish my starving soul. I needed to find a safe place to remember myself. Within a year, I’d jumped ship and was renovating a dilapidated old cottage in the mountains of Connemara, recovering my self-belief and slowly beginning to forge the new life that led finally to me becoming what I’d always dreamed of, but had never believed would really be possible: a fulltime, professional writer.
The story showed me how to get started, because stories like this one—stories from the oral tradition which have been handed down by our ancestors through generation after generation—once were told precisely to help us find our bearings and to guide us through heartbreaking times. But more than that, the story gave me a vision: a dream of courage, of a path with heart, of depth and creativity emerging from immersion in the natural world. And it set me the lifelong challenge of discovering what it actually means to dwell free. Fairy tales, then, can shine a light on both inner and outer experience, and show us what it might look like to be deeply rooted in our own life. They’re stories to live by, and we’ve never needed them more than we need them now.
Women and girls have never needed them more than we need them now. Although the women’s rights movement has been active in the West since the 1840s, recent research in the United Kingdom shows that young Generation Z women still think it’s very much harder to be a woman than a man. And how could it ever be possible for women to feel they are thriving, when two million women a year in the United Kingdom alone—one in every twelve—are estimated to be the victims of male violence? And when our culture measures worth and success by standards that continue to be profoundly masculine and heroic? In a rapidly changing world replete with endless social, political and environmental crises, in which economic uncertainty has become the norm and a liveable future for us and for our children is increasingly hard to imagine, it can be especially hard for girls and young women to find an anchor and develop an authentic sense of self.
As well as helping us to process our traumas, fairy tales can shine a light on our natural transitions: on all the stages of a woman’s ever-metamorphosing life.
But fairy tales insist that we face the unfaceable and dig deep for previously unimagined inner resources. They teach us to be savvy, inspire us to grow in confidence, show us how to be bold and claim the future we dream of. They contain master keys which unlock an understanding not just of the shape of our life but its meaning. They breathe life into our hopes and dreams; they illuminate who we are—and who we might possibly someday become. And they show us how to live and express those unique qualities in an interconnected world, with values and moral codes shaped by relationship, respect and reciprocity.
That set of propositions isn’t as surprising as it might initially seem. Fairy tales, as a subset of folk tales, are by definition the stories of the folk, and they were always designed to shed light on the issues that ordinary people face as we grow up and grow old. They’re free of the grandeur and expectations of myth, and of all-conquering frameworks like the Hero’s Journey. Our ancestors—the hard-working, long-suffering peasant women who told these stories to each other and passed them down the generations through the oral tradition—knew everything there was to know about adversity. Growing up and growing older today is hard, and the stakes are high—but it’s always been hard, and the stakes have always been high.
And the universal ancestral wisdom that’s locked up in fairy tales shows us that although our individual ways of responding to life’s joys and vicissitudes might be unique, and although times change and the texture of our challenges might change too, the fundamental issues that women face are the same issues that we’ve always faced. How to leave home. How to navigate an encounter with the big bad wolf. How to reclaim the lost art of apprenticeship and put in the work that’s needed to reach our highest potential. How to recover the skin that was stolen from us. How to manage in times of war or famine. How to beat the Devil. How to cultivate the sheer bloodymindedness that’s necessary to survive the inevitable, relentless hazards of a woman’s life.
Fairy tales offer archetypal themes and characters and universal images of beauty and sorrow—like the handless maiden, wandering alone in the forest, bleeding from the stumps of her severed hands—that resonate with our own personal experiences, as well as connecting us to a larger human tradition of meaning-making. They kickstart the psyche, and this is particularly important when we are fearful, lost or trapped.
But although they offer dazzling images of hope and redemption, fairy tales don’t shy away from the darker sides of life. They show us how to keep our voices strong and alive, even when we finally find ourselves face to face with the giant who skinned our older sisters, or the wife-killing, knife-wielding, blue-bearded husband who has cornered us in the one bloody room he forbade us to enter.
As well as helping us to process our traumas, fairy tales can shine a light on our natural transitions: on all the stages of a woman’s ever-metamorphosing life. If we recognize ourselves as that girl lost in the dark forest, as the young seal-woman dancing on a moonlit beach whose future husband steals her skin, or as the midlife woman who walks out of her marriage and transforms herself into a fox—then we recognize too that we’re living through an archetypal story: a universal one. We come to understand that we’re not alone, that other women have had these experiences too—and have found their way out of the woods again and thrived. Because fairy tales, historically, have predominantly been women’s stories, told by women to women. We recognize ourselves in these dispossessed princesses and cast-out daughters, and we share their difficulties; at one time or another, we’ll all have felt outcast, marginalized, deprived of voice.
Quite simply, they show us what it might look like to live a good life.
But we can also recognize ourselves in their bravery, integrity and cleverness, because their tales of darkness and despair always shapeshift into stories of hope and wholeness. Contrary to popular belief, which has arisen out of patriarchal influences and the early Disneyfication of several well-known stories, fairy-tale heroines are rarely passive: they’re wise, strong and brave, and are very much more likely to rescue than be rescued. And fairy tales with female protagonists are not just stories of oppression and outdated gender roles, but stories of awakening, opportunity and transformation. They are stories of subversion which offer us the means to imagine and constantly reimagine ourselves.
Fairy-tale heroines are also remarkably diverse, and offer us many iterations of the archetypal feminine. They’re mostly not golden-haired, pea-eschewing princesses: we’re much more likely to find a heroine who is just as comfortable in the form of a bird or animal as a woman, or who clothes herself in rags and disguises her identity to forge for herself a new, more functional story. These girls and women show us so many ways that we might become well and whole, so many ways that we might ripen into a purpose-filled and meaningful adulthood, and on a journey that is enriched, rather than broken, by its many challenges.
Fairy tales can illuminate our individual narratives and teach us about the values and behaviors that will help us grow and thrive. But our own narratives are lived out in the context of a series of larger ones: the stories which underpin human culture, the stories of the places we inhabit and the other-than-humans who co-exist in them with us, and the wider story of life on this beautiful planet. Like the traditions of so many Indigenous cultures around the world, European fairy tales, taken together, provide us with insight into every level of those interconnected stories, and remind us of the moral codes that allow all of us—human, other-than-human, planet—to flourish.
No fairy-tale heroine makes it through to the end of her journey alone: there’s always community, or some kind of angel waiting in the woods to offer advice or care. These stories situate us in a living, animate world in which the embodied wisdom of a horse might just be more valuable in some situations than the wisdom of a human being.
It’s a world that we are part of and fully participate in; sometimes, in a fairy tale, children will even grow out of roses hidden under the bed. They reassure us that a juicy pear will patiently be waiting to offer itself to a needy traveller, while teaching us not to take more than we need. They tell us how to live in balance and harmony with nature, and with the Otherworld that they insist is entangled with this one. They lift us out of the confines of our own head and show us what it is to be rooted in the world: how to be in relationship; how to be in service to something bigger than ourselves. Their focus on old values of community, mutual respect, reciprocity and the embrace of the gift economy is an antidote to the individualistic, competitive and combative discourse that’s prevalent in the West today.
In this way, they remind us of the values, and offer back the meaning, that we’ve lost. Quite simply, they show us what it might look like to live a good life.
__________________________________
From Ripening: Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now. Used with the permission of the publisher, September Publishing. Copyright © 2026 by Sharon Blackie
Leave a Reply