The Princess & The Pea: A Tale of Sensory Processing Disorder
My parents used to call me, “The Princess and The Pea,” because I seemingly felt everything.
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My parents used to call me, “The Princess and The Pea,” because I seemingly felt everything.
The Princess and The Pea (“The Princess on The Pea” as the literal translation from Danish) tells the story of a prince looking for his one true (rigtig “rightful”) princess. One stormy night, a girl goes to the prince’s castle to seek shelter. She declares herself a princess, but the prince and the queen are doubtful. Thus, a test is prepared to see if the girl is a real princess. The queen places a single pea in the bed of the guest. The pea is covered by twenty mattresses and twenty eider-down beds. The following morning, the girl proclaims (from the Danish translation):
“Oh, what a terrible thing!” said the Princess, “I have hardly closed my eyes all night! God knows what has been in the bed? I've been lying on something hard, so I'm quite brown and blue all over my body! It's quite terrifying!”
She felt the singular pea. She passed the test. She is a princess after all because she is so delicate to notice such a small, insignificant thing. The text reads (again from the Danish translation): “No one could be so tender-hearted but a real princess.”
As a kid, I read (and was read to) many stories and I loved fairytales. My favorites were: The Snow Queen/Snedronningen), Vasilisa The Fair/Bасилиса Прекрасная (of which, the infamous Baba Yaga makes an appearance), and The Fir Tree/Grantræet.
At the time, I didn’t relate to the princess in The Princess and The Pea. I didn’t really think anything of her or the story. It didn’t excite me; it was too short and I didn’t understand the point. However, when I revisited the story years later (and again recently), I saw what my parents saw. The girl in the story clearly had sensory integration/processing disorder. The girl was clearly me.
As a child, I had many sensory issues (as an adult, I still do). I was always feeling overwhelmed by sounds, sights, and certain touch. There is a neurodivergent joke that goes: “Are you the type of autistic who has to wear socks all of the time or the type to never wear socks?” I am the latter. I was a child (and now adult) who never wanted socks on her feet (foot prisons, as I refer to them now). I was diagnosed with SPD (sensory processing disorder), but not until I was an adult, and it explained so much about my childhood and early adulthood. I can’t wear clothing that I feel is “scratchy” or tight or any way uncomfortable. I am incredibly sensitive to people and things that touch me. It feels a bit like what I would imagine it’s like to live without a protective skin barrier. Mothers/parents who feel “touched out” might know a bit about what I mean. Add this to the hyper-vigilance I have from childhood and adult trauma, and it can be an enormous feat just being out in the world.
The princess in The Princess and The Pea feels the pea because she is considered delicate, hypersensitive, fragile—traits only a true princess can possess, according to Andersen. Nearly 100 years after its publication, Fellow Danish writer and Andersen biographer, Signe Toksvig noted, “[the story] seems to the reviewer not only indelicate but indefensible, in so far as the child might absorb the false idea that great ladies must always be so terribly thin-skinned.” A very true statement that one could say about most princess stories where the girls/women seem more object than subject. These “objects” are consistently admired for their fragility bordering on frailty, their tentativeness, and their desperate need for “rescue.”
Professor Maria Tatar gives a different take on our princess than Toksvig saying,
…the sensitivity of the princess can also be read on a metaphorical level as a measure of the depth of her feeling and compassion. And Andersen also gives us a feisty herione, who defies the elements and shows up on the doorstep of a prince…
Sensitivity is not fragility nor is it a trait put on to please the prince and taken off later. The girl is herself and this doesn’t change. She is oblivious to the “test” that the prince and the queen created, and as if completely understandable (because it is), she speaks about her inner knowing and felt-sense—under all those mattresses and beds. Something as small as a pea ruined her sleep.
I could tell you about countless times where something small, singular, insignificant (to anyone else) ruined my sleep, my day, a moment. I could tell you the amount of times I’ve lost sleep over a sensation in my body so tiny that I often wondered if the reverberation was coming from my head. Had I made it up? No. I felt it. I feel everything. I could tell you how difficult it is to be so self-aware, so emotionally open, and so crazed by sensations.
I process sensations every millisecond, without needing to think about it, and that is why I ended up on Zoloft at 17. These sensations were so loud that I could no longer function. Because nobody knew what else to do, medication was the only thing I had access to. I’m glad for it, because it literally saved my life. However, having been on it for so long now, and noticing its numbing affects wear off in the last seven years, I am left to re-learn how to process sensations in a way that doesn’t stop me from functioning. I don’t want to feel numb. I want to feel it all. I don’t want to be afraid of any sensation. I don’t want it to stop me from living.
The Princess and The Pea is a love letter to those of us with Sensory Processing Disorder. It’s a love letter to anyone who feels deeply. It’s a love letter showing that heightened sensitivity and awareness can only aid in our collective, global struggle.
Without us, our movements would not move.
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Thank you from your fellow princess. So many peas!