Once upon a time, there was a beautiful, young princess.\u00a0 Her name was Lulu. \u00a0Princess Lulu loved to run.\u00a0 Running made her feel wonderful and beautiful and free.<\/p>\n
One day, when Lulu was still just a girl, one of her friends decided to steal something from her.\u00a0 She trusted him.\u00a0 But he took something from Lulu and it caused her to break a little on the inside.\u00a0 He broke a part of her, the part that made her remember that she was beautiful.\u00a0 Lulu was sad.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t want to get her friend in trouble and she thought she was to blame for allowing him to take it.\u00a0 So she kept it a secret.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t tell anyone about what her friend had done for a long, long time.<\/p>\n
A few years later, Lulu was separated from her father.\u00a0 She missed him tremendously.\u00a0 Her father was the person that reminded her that she was beautiful no matter what.\u00a0 And she started to forget.\u00a0 The broken part not only caused her to forget that she was beautiful and forget all the good things about herself, it started breaking up other parts too.\u00a0 It got worse.\u00a0 The longer she kept the secret, the harder it was to remember the girl she had once been and she started to believe that she was anything but beautiful.<\/p>\n
Princess Lulu still loved to run.\u00a0 It still made her feel good.\u00a0 But it no longer made her feel beautiful.\u00a0 Now it made her feel tough.\u00a0 And if she was tough, then she felt powerful, and that would show other people that they couldn\u2019t take things away from her.<\/p>\n
But then, one day many years later, her father came back.\u00a0 She was scared; she didn\u2019t want him to see the brokenness that made her feel so yucky.\u00a0 But her father had a special mirror that allowed Lulu to see not only her beauty on the outside, but more importantly all of the beautiful parts on the inside.\u00a0 Her father already knew about the broken parts,\u00a0and he could help put them back together.\u00a0 He showed her that she was beautiful even without the part that was missing.\u00a0 Slowly, her heart began to mend and the more beauty she could see in herself, the more beautiful she became.<\/p>\n
When she ran, it was no longer about feeling beautiful or feeling tough, it was just about being who she was and reminding herself how far she had come, all those miles that were behind her.\u00a0 It was about reminding herself that she wasn\u2019t broken anymore.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Today when I ran, I wasn\u2019t running for me.\u00a0 I was running to try to prove something, but I was carrying around so much weight that it just didn\u2019t work.\u00a0 I forgot how far I\u2019ve come.\u00a0 I forgot to just be me.\u00a0 And the more things went wrong, the more I slowed myself down worrying about them.\u00a0 \u00a0So, even though I didn\u2019t hit my goal this time, I guess I didn\u2019t entirely blow it, because as always, I learned a lesson from the experience.<\/p>\n
So, do you want to know the rest of the story? What happened to Princess Lulu?\u00a0 Well, the story isn\u2019t over yet.\u00a0 It\u2019s still being written.\u00a0 But you should know that Princess Lulu is healthy and happy, most of the time anyway.\u00a0 She will never get back what that boy who claimed to be her friend took away from her, but she has learned to look beyond it.\u00a0 She no longer feels like a victim of his theft. \u00a0And she knows she is not defined by the part that is missing. \u00a0Some days she feels beautiful and other days she wrestles with what exactly that means.\u00a0 But no matter how she sees herself, she knows that her father always sees her in that special mirror and she knows that, more than anything, she is loved.<\/p>\n
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