The Snow Queen
By Regina C.
In my Russian class we recently read The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen and it made me think about how my life relates a lot to this story. The story begins with a troll, who represents the devil, and who owns a mirror. The troll thinks the mirror is the coolest thing because it makes people see the worst in everything.
As the troll was making his way around all the different countries showing the citizens the mirror, he accidentally dropped it. The mirror shattered into many pieces, and the shards spread all across the world.
When the shards fell to earth, they landed on people. In some, the shards worked into the eyes causing the people to see everything in the most pessimistic manner. In others, the shards pierced the heart and froze those people to care for anything around them.
The story continues with the introduction of a boy, Kay, and a girl, Gerda. They were such good friends they felt like brother and sister and did everything together.
One day, while they were playing, Kay was struck with a shard from the mirror. It landed in his heart. After that Kay lost interest in Gerda and everyone else. The next day Gerda and Kay were sledding, and a woman, the Snow Queen, whose heart was frozen because of her wickedness, drove past them in a large sleigh. She invited Kay to accompany her in the sleigh leaving Gerda behind.
The Queen took him to the North Pole and kept him there until his heart became a chunk of ice. The rest of the story follows Gerda’s adventures as she tries to find Kay and bring him home.
Looking at the story from a symbolic point of view, my life is a copy of Kay’s. I am an only child, and when I was young I always tried to make friends to keep occupied and out of trouble. Often I put myself in situations where I would get hurt. As time went on I ended up with a glass shard inside my heart.
When I started to re-feel the hurt of getting made fun of, and not having the “perfect” family, I began to find ways to numb those feelings. I began to surround myself with drugs and alcohol, which allowed me to become insensitive to pain for short periods of time. Like Kay, I began to hate the world around me, and I tried to pull others down with me.
Before I got to The Family Foundation School I was a monster. I did what I wanted, and I allowed my life to spiral downward. I became a part of the Snow Queen and allowed myself to be “possessed” by all the negative influences around me.
Since then I have learned to see that there are other people like me, trying to get rid of the shard and become more open to the good things around them. In my life, the Snow Queen was my escape, my mom played the role of Gerda, trying to save me from the control of evil, and the shard of the mirror was what attracted me to becoming a monster.
In the end my mom has done an astonishing job helping me get back on track with my life to make my future as successful as possible. Now without the mirror shard in my heart, I can appreciate the wonderful opportunities that are available to me that I never saw before and paid little or no attention to.
