Disney - A Lifelong Adventure
My first trip to Disneyland was a royal disaster. I was two, barely able to register my surroundings, and my relatives absolutely could not wait to take me. So my parents, my aunt, and my uncle made sure we started our day right when the park opened. From the moment we got into the park, however, I started crying for some undetermined reason. Crying quickly progressed to bawling, which then advanced to screaming, finally crescendoing into a full-fledged tantrum. My family members did everything they could to quench my despair - they took me on It’s a Small World, took me to meet my favorite princesses, and even waited an hour and a half in line for Peter Pan’s Flight. According to them, though, nothing could calm me, and they had to end their Disneyland day hours earlier than they had expected.
It has been 17 years since my first visit to Disneyland, and no one can figure out why I had such an allergic reaction to it. After that day, Disney movies became a part of my daily routine. I quickly started to show a predilection towards the Disney Princess films, as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty became immediate favorites. I even had Cinderella bed sheets! And when The Little Mermaid came out, any social life that I (or my mom) had at that time was soon forgotten. Hours upon hours were spent watching these movies and then immediately rewinding them so that I could sing along with the characters just once more. When I was seven, I finally had the guts to watch Beauty and the Beast. True, it scared me at first, but I just could not get the lovable kitchen ware out of my mind. When my sister was born when I was five, this brought in a whole new wave of Disney craze. Suddenly, it became an annual family tradition for us to spend a whole day at Disneyland, which became my favorite day of the year. Before we knew it, Disney was infiltrating our everyday lives.
By the time I was in middle school, I thought that my obsession for Disney was just a phase and would fizzle out by the time I was in high school. I was surely mistaken. For my 14th birthday, I chose to spend the day at Disneyland. For my 15th birthday, my Aunt bought me an Annual Pass, which I used as many times that I could get my mom to drive me to the park. When I was 16, I dressed up as Cinderella for Halloween. And at 17, summer (before college, mind you) was filled with afternoons spent watching Disney movies and coloring in my brand new Disney Princess colorbook. This had become, I realized, an obsession I would not escape.
In November 2008, I got the opportunity to attend a Leadership Conference at Disney World with a small group from my college. When I walked into the Magic Kingdom and saw the castle for the first time, I was in such awe of the beauty that I actually started crying. It was like nothing I had ever seen before - not even the Disneyland castle could compare. And I knew from that moment on that this magic was something I wanted to experience forever.
This is why it is my life’s goal to work for Disney. To me, it is more than just a multi-billion dollar world-wide conglomerate. It actually feels much smaller than that. To me, it feels like home. It is my childhood, my adolescence, and my present all rolled up into one joyous experience. Disney makes me feel as though there is a magic in the world that only exists in the happiness of a child, and it is Disney’s dream to help everyone remember that magic as they grow older. I want to help carry out that dream and spread the happiness to others in the hopes that no one, no matter how old or how different from me they may be, forgets the blissfulness of youth.
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