Somewhere in childhood, most of us picked up a quiet assumption about who we were supposed to turn into. Maybe it came from a parent who saw a flash of themselves in us and assumed the rest would follow. Maybe it came from a teacher who decided early on that we were "the shy one" or "the smart one" or "the difficult one," and treated us that way until we started to believe it too. Either way, a lot of us spent years measuring ourselves against a version of ourselves nobody actually asked us to become. We just absorbed it, the way you absorb the temperature of a room without noticing you are cold until someone hands you a sweater.
There is a small, easy-to-miss moment in the prologue of Sabrina Victoria's The Princess of Himmapan that stayed with me longer than I expected. Queen Khin watches her young son Zeya, who is timid, quick to blush, more at ease with a paintbrush than with words, and the narration tells us she assumes he will grow out of this. That he will grow into someone more like her, more composed, more sure of himself in the way she is. It is not said unkindly. It reads more like a parent's private hope, the kind we do not always say out loud even to ourselves. But it is there, and it is honest in a way that a lot of fiction skips over. We do not often admit, even in stories, that sometimes the people who love us most are quietly waiting for us to become someone we are not.
I think almost everyone has a version of this moment somewhere in their own life. A parent who wanted an extrovert and got a kid who preferred a book in the corner. A family that valued a certain kind of achievement, and a kid who wanted something quieter, stranger, harder to explain at dinner. None of this requires anyone to be a villain. Most of the time, people project the shape of themselves onto the people they love simply because it is the only shape they know well enough to hope for. It takes a certain kind of patience, one that is not always taught to us, to look at someone you love and let them be genuinely unfamiliar to you, rather than a slightly different draft of yourself.
What I find gentle about this scene, rather than sad, is that it captures something true about growing up in general. Most of us spend our early years being sketched by other people's expectations before we ever pick up the pencil ourselves. We are told what we are good at before we have had the chance to test it privately. We are told what we are like before we have had a quiet enough moment to ask ourselves whether that is actually true, or just the label that stuck because it was convenient at the time.
And then, if we are lucky, something happens that lets us test the sketch against the real thing. Maybe it is a hobby we return to on our own, with no audience, no grade, no one watching to confirm whether we are doing it right. Maybe it is a season of our life where the usual expectations fall away, a gap year, a move to a new city, a long illness, a quiet stretch of unemployment, and we notice, almost by accident, which parts of ourselves were actually load-bearing and which parts were just decoration we picked up to please someone else. It is a strange kind of grief and relief at the same time, realizing that some of what you thought was fundamentally you was really just a costume you wore because it made things easier at home.
I do not think this process ever fully finishes, honestly. I still catch myself, every so often, performing a version of competence or cheerfulness that is not quite how I feel, simply because it is the version people expect from me by now. It is a strange kind of inertia. Once someone decides you are "the reliable one" or "the funny one" or "the one who never gets rattled," it becomes oddly difficult to admit, even to yourself, when you are none of those things on a given day. You start managing an image instead of living a life, and the gap between the two can widen so slowly you do not notice it happening.
What Zeya's early scenes suggest, gently, is the possibility of a different path, one where a person is allowed to stay exactly as unusual as they naturally are, painting instead of speaking, feeling instead of performing, without a parent's private hope quietly nudging them toward some other version of themselves. Whether that possibility gets honored in the story that follows, I will not say. But the mere presence of that tension in the opening pages, a mother's hope colliding softly with a son's actual nature, felt like enough of an invitation to sit with the question in my own life for a while.
Who did you expect yourself to become, before you actually became anyone at all? And how much of who you are today is really you, versus a shape you settled into because it was expected, convenient, or safer than the alternative?
There is no clean answer to that. Most of us are some blend of both, a self we grew organically and a self we built to survive certain rooms, certain families, certain seasons of our lives. The trick, if there is one, might just be noticing the difference every once in a while. Checking in with yourself the way you would check in with an old friend you have not seen in a while. Not to overhaul everything, just to ask, gently, whether the sweater you have been wearing all these years still actually fits, or whether you only kept it on because someone handed it to you once and you never thought to take it off.
There is something almost restful about a story that opens with a child being allowed to be strange, gentle, artistic, and unlike the people around him, even if only for a few pages before the plot demands more of him. It is a small reminder that the people we become do not have to be a neater, tidier version of the people who raised us. Sometimes the most honest thing we can do, for ourselves and for the people who love us, is simply become whoever we actually are, and trust that the people who matter will learn to love that version too, even if it takes them longer than we would like.
I closed the prologue thinking less about the mythical creatures waiting in the forest and more about my own quiet inventory of expectations, the ones I inherited and the ones I built myself, and which of them I would still choose if I were starting from scratch today. That felt like a good place to pause, before the actual story even begins.