A Real Princess™

June 17, 2025

Musings

“…they could see that she was a real princess, because she had felt the pea right through the twenty mattresses and the twenty featherbeds. Nobody but a real princess could be that sensitive.” – Hans Christian Andersen, translated by D.L. Ashliman

In Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea,” a prince is determined to marry a Real Princess™. He travels the world looking for her, but no matter how many princesses he meets, he just doesn’t think any of them are authentically princess-y enough.

One night, a princess appears on his doorstep in the middle of a storm, miserable and soaked to the bone. The prince’s mother, who apparently shares her son’s obsession with True Princesshood, decides to test her. She places a single pea on the guest bed, then covers it with twenty mattresses and follows that with twenty featherbeds of eiderdown.

When asked how she slept on her mattress tower the next morning, the princess replies that she slept horrifically, thank you very much, and that she lay on something so hard that she’s black and blue all over her body.

The prince is thrilled because her extreme sensitivity means that, at long last, he has found a Real Princess™, and so they marry and put the pea in an art gallery where everyone can marvel at it.

I’ve been circling around this story for years now, trying to pin down exactly how I feel about it. It (and similar versions from around the world) are clearly supposed to be funny, even satirical. Waking up black and blue after a miserable night of sleep is not exactly #goals, let alone a reliable indicator of nobility. If I put on my literary scholar hat, it seems very clear that “The Princess and the Pea” is designed to poke fun at the values of the aristocracy (something that Andersen certainly had a personal and complex stake in), and of course it’s taking sensitivity to marvelously hyperbolic heights.

Then again…there are days when I wonder how hyperbolic it actually is? (This message is brought to you by someone who spent the weekend struggling with things like holding a dinner plate and opening doors. #ChronicPain #PeaPrincess)

There’s just something else here, whether Andersen intended it or not.

Maybe you feel it, too?

For the last few months, I’ve been thinking in particular about the princess’s inability to sleep, even though she has a surplus of luxurious mattresses and bedding.

I’ve had a fraught relationship with sleep for almost as far back as I can remember. Since before I was a teenager, I’ve been both maniacal about carving out enough time to get a full night’s sleep and chronically exhausted. I wake up gasping from nightmares, heart racing, unable to fall back asleep. Or I wake up flooded with sick adrenaline, and my problem-solving brain can’t help but immediately catalogue anything that I could have said or done to account for my feelings of panic. Or sometimes, I’d just rather not with this unending vicious cycle and read a book until deeply inadvisable hours.

When I do wake up in the morning, I feel black and blue all over and surly as hell. Let’s just charitably say that I’m not a morning person. (Brittany can vouch for me on this.) Nope, instead I’m an Anderson-approved Real Princess™ in a bed full of peas.

After doing literally all the things you’re supposed to do to improve sleep quality (blackout curtains, no phone in the bedroom at night, “sleep hygiene” galore) with no improvement, I’d pretty much just accepted that this was how things were going to be.

A few months ago (so about the time I started obsessing about this fairy tale again), I got a curve ball:

Turns out I have sleep apnea. And it also turns out that I feel a LOT BETTER when I’m not constantly suffocating all night instead of sleeping. Who knew?

I’m still genuinely trying to process the fact that a very large pea has been removed from my mattress. After actual decades of this, it’s hard to trust that the improvement is real. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“The Princess and the Pea” holds so much potential for talking about invisible disability, insomnia, chronic pain, and all the things that aren’t easily perceived or understood by others. Even if the story is supposed to be a joke, it’s still a story about real causes from effects that other people can’t see. It’s a fairy tale, a frame that’s ripe for storytelling and reimagining.

And so we have a journaling prompt for you:

What’s your pea right now? And, perhaps, what’s a tiny step you can take to get it closer to the edge of your mattress?

(Mine’s an oral appliance. #FairyTaleLife #Glamor)

PEA PRINCESSES UNITE!

Does this way of reading “The Princess and the Pea” make sense to you? Does it resonate? If it does, we’d absolutely love it if you’d reply below and let us know.

Yours in mischief and magic,