She Was Never Just a Princess: What General Leia Organa Taught Me About Being a Woman

May the 4th Be With You and May You Finally Take Up the Space She Always Did

I was a kid when I walked into that theater in 1977 and watched a young woman in white robes look an Imperial officer dead in the eye - having just hidden the Death Star plans in a droid - and say, with magnificent contempt: "Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?"

Something cracked open in my chest.

Not because she was beautiful, though she was. Not because she was royalty, though she was that, too. But because she was annoyed. Because she was competent. Because she clearly had approximately zero patience for anyone's nonsense, including that of the men who had come to rescue her and she made that known immediately.

I didn't have the words for it then. I just knew I wanted to be her.

Let's be honest about what the world was handing girls in 1977. We were getting rescued princesses. We were getting women who existed as motivation for the hero's journey, props in someone else's story. We were getting told, through a thousand small cultural messages, that our job was to be lovely, to be grateful, and to wait.

And then here came Leia Organa, Senator of Alderaan, General of the Resistance, and the most magnificently unimpressed woman in the galaxy.

She endures torture at Vader's hands and doesn't break. She watches her entire planet destroyed - her family, her home, every person she ever loved - and within hours she is back at the tactical table, directing the Rebel assault on the Death Star. That is not toughness for show. That is grief and rage and love alchemized into purpose. Therapists have a word for that. It's called post-traumatic growth, and it is extraordinarily hard-won.

She rescues Han. She rescues Luke. She disseminates intelligence, commands fighters, and earns the respect of an entire rebellion - in a cultural moment that was actively, openly skeptical of women in leadership. She didn't wait for permission. She didn't soften herself to make others comfortable. She led, and she expected to be followed.

Now. I need to talk about Jabba the Hutt.

Because when I tell you I jumped out of my seat -

Leia had been chained. Costumed. Displayed as a trophy by a creature who believed that possession was the same as power. She had been put in a cage designed to diminish and humiliate her. And what did she do?

She picked up the chain they put on her, and she used it.

I have thought about that moment more times than I can count, in more contexts than Star Wars. Because life will put chains on you. Systems will. People will. And the question isn't always how do I escape this - sometimes it's what can I do with exactly what I have, right now, from exactly where I am?

That's not resignation. That is the most radical kind of agency.

Here's something I've come to understand, decades later, that I didn't have language for as a girl watching those films: Leia is neurodivergent-coded in a way that feels deeply personal to me.

She perceives things others can't. She senses the Force - feels Luke's call across the void of space, reaches for Ben with a grief that defies physics - in a world where most people cannot access that layer of reality at all. She processes the universe differently. She sees what others miss. She knows things she shouldn't be able to know, and she acts on that knowledge even when she can't fully explain it.

Sound familiar to anyone?

Those of us who are neurodivergent - who feel things at frequencies others can't quite tune into, who notice patterns and connections others overlook, whose nervous systems are just wired a little differently - we have been told our entire lives that our perception is the problem. That we're too sensitive, too intense, too much, too other.

Leia never apologizes for what she perceives. She trusts it. She acts on it. And she saves people because of it.

By the time the newer films arrived, I was older. I had lived some things. And watching Carrie Fisher bring Leia back as a General - silver-haired, battle-worn, still standing - I felt something different than I had as a kid.

I felt recognized.

Because General Leia leads not with the fire of youth but with something harder to cultivate and easier to underestimate: wisdom. She holds humor and grief in the same hand. She makes room for the flawed, complicated people around her - Han, who broke her heart; Ben, who broke it again - without pretending those breaks didn't happen. She is not bitter. She is not naive. She is something rarer.

She is integrated. She has metabolized her losses and kept moving. She has stayed in the fight not because she has forgotten what it cost her, but because she remembers exactly what it cost her, and she has decided it's still worth it.

That is not something a twenty-two-year-old can fake. That takes a life.

I think about the girls who are watching these films now and the women who watched them then and are still here, still carrying what we carry. Leia was the first proof many of us ever had that a woman could be the center of the story. Not the love interest. Not the reward. Not the tragedy that motivates someone else.

The center.

She was political. She was fierce. She was funny. She was grieving. She was strategic and sarcastic and capable of extraordinary tenderness. She contained multitudes, and she never once suggested that containing multitudes was a problem she needed to fix.

She was the first feminist icon of film for a lot of us. And she earned it - not because she was perfect, but because she was real in all the ways that mattered.

So today - May the 4th, the silliest and most sincere of all nerd holidays - I want to ask you something.

Where in your life have you been handed a chain and told to wear it quietly?

And what would it look like to use it instead?

You don't have to be a princess. You don't have to be a general. You just have to be exactly who you are, with exactly what you have, right where you are.

Leia would tell you that's enough to start a rebellion.

If any of this landed for you - the neurodivergence piece, the leadership piece, the "I've been carrying a lot and I'm still here" piece - I'd love to talk. Coaching isn't rescue. It's strategy. And you already have more than you think.

Drop a comment below: Who was your first "I want to be HER" moment? Mine is still a woman in white robes with a blaster and absolutely no patience for being underestimated.

#MayThe4thBeWithYou #WomenWhoLead #NeurodivergentLife