Rumor has it that somewhere along the line, every girl was bound to be a damsel in distress. Life was going to get too hard or she was going to get stuck in a castle and need rescuing because she couldn’t bear to do it on her own. Ever since we were young, this message of needing a knight in shining armor or a prince charming has been ingrained into the back of our minds.

Think of every Disney princess movie we watched growing up. Cinderella, a personal favorite, needed to be saved by a prince to escape her family. Snow White was in a coma in a display case until a prince came to save her. Sleeping Beauty, again, in all of her distress was saved by a prince. These movies are all wonderful, and, of course, should still be watched, but they provide the misconception to young girls that someone will always come along to save them.

Everyone needs to be picked up off of their knees every now and then, but that doesn’t mean that every time we’re in distress or we’re facing an issue that we need to be saved. It will take us longer to wait for a knight in shining armor than it would to just handle the problem on our own. Now, moral support might be needed, but that doesn’t mean that at a drop of a hat we need someone to swoop in and handle our lives for us.

Independence is something we have to discover sooner or later and we will never learn if every time we find ourselves in a mess we expect someone else to clean it up for us. News flash – there is no prince charming or knight in shining armor that will always be there to help us back to our feet. We can deal with whatever it may be on our own, and if not, we will ask for help when we need it.

People injecting themselves into our lives isn’t helping either. If we need help, we’ll ask for it. Sometimes we get this feeling that we know what other people need and thus throw ourselves into their problems to help them solve whatever they may be dealing with. As much as we want to help, it’s not our place to swoop in unannounced and “work our magic.” More times than not we’re just making everything worse.

Fighting our own battles is difficult, but how can we feel accomplished if we let others fight them for us?