The Pilot: An Introduction Into My "Disney Adult" Life

  "You're never too old to be young and gay" - Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs

Both on and offline there has been an ever-growing trend of judgment. You must fit a tiny mold to be considered normal, or even sane. You can't be too loud but you mustn't be too quiet either. You can't wear anything too "basic," but god forbid you wear anything too extravagant! There are so many lifestyle "cores" these days, and so many people preach not to be judgmental of those cores because that is what makes their lives joyous. Meanwhile, those same people won't practice what they preach and instead judge what makes those outside of their circles happy. Both on and offline, there has been an ever-growing hatred of people who just enjoy simple things like cartoons, music, theme parks, and nostalgia. People who just want to feel young and excitable about all of the little things in life. 

  As humans, we're all the ages we've ever been before. We both do and don't have the same personalities throughout our lives all at the same time. We attach memories and feelings to certain things and someday we re-visit those memories and feelings along with the personality traits we left behind as a child. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that you can always be as young as you ever were and you should never feel judged for that because it is an experience that we can all feel in this crazy life. You should be able to just have fun and re-live your best days as many times as you please. After all, we will never be able to have memories of the future, only the past. So you might as well turn your present into good memories while you can.

That is why I don't mind being a Disney adult.

  My name is Tammy and I am a Disney adult for a plethora of reasons, mostly unintentionally! And while I can go on and on about why I am one, I think you've already got the gist. So, to save you from (continuing) reading a bunch of rambling on why being a Disney adult shouldn't be controversial, I'll merely just explain how I got to this point.

  It all started back in the 80's, 19 years before I was even born! My grandparents, who we call Baba and Deda (short for babushka and dedushka) , were immigrants from Russia. My mother was naturalized because she was only two at the time of immigration. My aunt, she was born shortly after in Pennsylvania before they inevitably ended up moving to New York City. There, Baba and Deda opened a video store. They had everything from the hottest new releases, the obscure and unheard of, as well as the classics too! Unfortunately, with the whole blockbuster boom, their shop's time eventually had to come to an end. They kept a TON of stuff from the shop like movies and promotional materials though. Even while I was growing up, our closets were full of random posters and carboard cut outs. The walls in our hallways and some of the bedrooms were lined with those black plastic VHS storage racks and not a single slot was ever empty. A couple of those storage racks were eventually replaced with metal DVD racks and shelves since they took up less space.

  Clearly, we watched a LOT of movies all the time. If we weren't sitting down watching one together on the big TV, we'd be in our own rooms watching separate movies on the smaller TV's. Yet, with a seemingly endless collection of movies and shows available, my family always gravitated towards watching Disney films. Why? I'll never know for sure, but I can only assume that they brought comfort and distraction during harder times. My babushka also really loves pretty, girly, and elegant things, like princesses, even if they weren't Disney princesses. She also really loves music and basically anything to do with the arts. So it's no surprise that she was drawn towards Disney films.

  My mother had me young at only 21, and she was widowed without ever being married. We lived in Brooklyn with my grandparents at the border of Queens for most of my childhood. Since we only lived 13 minutes from JFK my mom worked there for a chunk of time before going to college. Since she had that job and I was her only child (and the economy wasn't screwed) for a long time, she took me to Magic Kingdom for the first time when I was 3. To this day, as an almost 24 year old, I have vivid memories of my first time at Walt Disney World. I can remember my first time seeing the castle in all of it's glory and getting on "it's a small world"for the first time too, being terrified of the magic mirror in Snow White's Scary Adventures, getting lost but being found by none other than Mickey Mouse himself, meeting princess Ariel, and even having Peter Pan run away from his float during SpectroMagic to come say hi to me! Man, I wish we still had SpectroMagic, that was such a cool parade!

  Visiting Magic Kingdom for the first time really did impact my childhood. I genuinely thought it was the COOLEST place ever! I thought about it all the time to the point that the following year in pre-k when we were asked what we wanted to be when we grew up I confidently proclaimed that I was going to be a Queen because I wanted to live in Cinderella's castle. My teacher, aid, and all the kids around me giggled and told me that it wasn't a job that I could have. So what did I do? I once again, confidently proclaimed that in that case, I would become a princess instead when I'm older. My teachers didn't know how to respond so they nicknamed me "Queen Tamara" from then on. I ran into one of those teachers as a teenager one time and she still remembered to call me Queen Tamara!

  Like I said earlier, I could keep going on and on about how Disney influenced my life. How Lilo & Stitch was my first movie in theaters, how one of my nicknames was Boo cause I looked like her, how I drew all the time growing up because I loved the Disney aesthetic, etcetera, etcetera. The things that REALLY shaped me though, were the lessons to be learned. The "if you can't say anything nice, don't say nothing at all's," the "believe you can, then you will's," and the "happiness is the richest thing we will ever own's". There are countless lessons to take away from Disney films, they're very useful even today.

All of this is why I am who I am today.

  If you made it to the end of this brain dump of a blog post, thank you for reading and welcome to my blog! I plan on creating a few different types of styles of blog posts on here, so if the brain dumping isn't your thing please consider checking out my other work! I'll be posting informational articles surrounding topics like fun facts, merchandise, news, tips/hacks, food recommendations, and all sorts of other fun things, all Disney-related of course! 

Thanks for reading, hope to see you around!

-Disney Adult, Tomorrowland Tammy <3